Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Steve Bannon's Contempt Charges Reveal Historic Double Standard; Interview with RFK Jr.'s Running Mate Nicole Shanahan on the 2024 Election and More
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June 08, 2024
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Good evening. It's Thursday, June 6. 

Tonight: Steve Bannon, one of President Trump's top White House advisers in the first part of his presidency and currently one of his closest and most important allies, was ordered to surrender to a federal prison on July 1, three weeks from now. Bannon had been out on bail pending an appeal of his 2022 conviction on charges of refusing to comply with a congressional subpoena that ordered him to testify about the events of January 6; he had a variety of legal arguments as to why he was not required to do that. Bannon was sentenced to four months in prison by a court that rejected those defenses and was allowed to be out on bail pending appeal. The appellate court rejected his appeal, and now the judge has ordered him to surrender to prison, even though he has more appeals left. 

In addition to President Trump himself, who was just convicted of 34 felonies on obviously dubious and – no pun intended – trumped-up charges – Bannon is not the first top Trump aide to be jailed for alleged violations of a congressional subpoena. In March of this year, President Trump's trade advisor, Peter Navarro, reported to a federal prison to serve a four-month sentence on similar charges. And, of course, a large group of key Trump White House officials and other allies, including General Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone and many others have also been convicted and imprisoned, or at least accused and convicted of crimes, all of which is unprecedented in all of American history. 

Indeed, Congress often issued subpoenas to Washington officials that are simply ignored or violated, in one way or the other, where these officials concoct excuses as to why they don't have to appear, that this conflict between the executive branch on the one hand and Congress on the other, is a central part of our system. It's been happening for decades if not centuries, and almost never do those events result in anything close to what has been done to Peter Navarro and now to Steve Bannon. We'll go through the relevant history to illustrate how, yet again, the Biden DOJ and Democratic prosecutors are so transparently weaponizing the legal system and judicial system against their political enemies for partisan ends. 

In general – as I learned firsthand when I started writing about politics in the second term of the Bush administration, and then into the Obama administration where there was a lot of talk at the time about the potential that Obama would prosecute Bush officials and CIA officials for committing crimes like torture, kidnapping and illegal domestic spying – the consensus in Washington politics and media – believe me, has long been for decades – that only banana republics prosecute their political enemies and prosecute their prior administration. I never agreed with that consensus. Indeed, I wrote countless articles against it and even a 2011 book arguing against it and titled “With Liberty and Justice for Some,” but these prosecutions of Trump and his allies do not represent an abandonment of that rotted Washington rule. If it did, I would be cheering for it. Like so many other things, it represents merely a temporary suspension of this Washington rule for one and only one political official named Donald Trump. 

Then: We will speak to Nicole Shanahan, now officially the vice presidential running mate of RFK, Jr. If polls hold up at all, that independent ticket will be one of the most successful independent presidential candidates in decades. Bobby Kennedy’s choice for a running mate baffled a lot of people. While Shanahan is reasonably well known in Silicon Valley – in part for accumulating a net worth estimated at $1 billion, largely, but not entirely, as a result of her marriage to one of the world's richest billionaires, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and in part due to her own accomplishments, an initiatives – very few American citizens had ever heard of Shanahan and know very little about her, in large part because she never held elected office of any kind. 

That does not mean that she has been uninterested in politics. She has indeed donated a large amount of money, primarily, if not exclusively, to Democratic Party candidates, including Hillary Clinton, Pete Buttigieg and the 2020 campaign of Joe Biden, as well as more left-wing candidates and causes. That, of course, raises a lot of questions about her current political views (which can reasonably change for a lot of people), her past political trajectory, and the role of big money in our politics. We'll talk to her about that, as well as her views on current U.S.-financed wars in Ukraine and Israel, the issue of online censorship, whistleblowers, and much more. 

For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now. 


 

After I first began writing about politics, in late 2005, within the next couple of years, one of the issues I talked about most often, was how there was a two-tiered justice system in the United States, where financial leaders, and especially political elites, are largely immunized from the rule of law. Oftentimes, this was taking place in the controversy over many obvious illegal programs that the Bush and Cheney administration had adopted in the name of the War on Terror, torturing detainees, kidnaping those people off the streets of Europe and sending them with no due process to Syria or Egypt to be tortured, or spying on American citizens without the warrants required by law. These were all crimes. And when Barack Obama ran in 2008, he was often asked whether he believed that those crimes should be prosecuted. He always gave the same answer, which is “Absolutely. Nobody's above the law and one of the first things I'm going to do when I win is direct my attorney general to investigate whether crimes were committed there and whether or not there should be prosecutions.” And yet, the minute he got into office, the media started haranguing him, that you don't go and prosecute your political adversaries in the United States, you don't go and prosecute prior administrations. This is only done in banana republics, not in the United States. 

My argument always was: well, what if they actually did commit crimes? What if the prior administration actually committed crimes? What if your political adversaries committed crimes? Are they supposed to be exempt from the same rule of law that applies to all other citizens? If this were a case where the consensus that has long existed in Washington by the media and politicians – that you don't go and prosecute your political adversaries or the prior administration – if that were being really lifted permanently because journalism and politics realized that were wrong, I'd be the first to applaud. That's not what's happening here.

Another issue that I've long talked about is how journalism is corrupt when it does nothing more than, say, “The Republicans say this, the Democrats say this, and it's not up for us to decide. We're just going to report what officials say in the U.S. government. We're not going to tell you if it's true or false.” And so, when the media started after Trump saying, “oh, we're going to start calling him a liar all the time,” I would also be cheering if it really meant an abandonment of that kind of lazy journalism, that kind of corrupting journalism where you don't investigate what powerful people claim, you just report it and mimic it and then leave it at that. But again, this practice is only for Trump. You will never hear of them saying those kinds of things about Joe Biden or Democratic Party officials or anyone else. So, this isn't a form of progress or evolution in how we understand things. This is obviously the political persecution and the judicial and legal persecution of Trump and his closest allies, not in the name of equal justice for all, but solely in the name of weaponizing the judicial system against a political movement that they regard with great fear that they will do anything to stop, including abusing the legal system.

From The Wall Street Journal earlier today on the Steve Bannon case:

 

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A federal judge Thursday ordered Steve Bannon to surrender by July 1 to serve a four-month prison sentence for defying the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack and former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

In a unanimous decision last month, a three-judge appeals court panel rejected Bannon’s arguments that his conviction wasn’t valid because he was following his lawyer’s advice when he refused to comply with a House subpoena demanding documents and testimony. The panel said Bannon’s advice-of-counsel defense wasn’t valid in contempt-of-Congress cases and would impede the legislature’s investigative authority.

Bannon was the first of two former Trump White House officials to face prosecution for defying the House panel. A year after Bannon’s conviction, former Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro was found guilty of defying the committee and later sentenced to four months in prison. Both cases stemmed from House referrals recommending that the Justice Department bring prosecutions. (The Wall Street Journal, June 6, 2024)

 

Someone who hasn't looked at these issues for very long might say, well, if Congress issues a subpoena, you're legally required to obey it. If you don't obey it, or you don't give the documents that they asked for and the testimony that they demand, truthfully, you will be held in contempt of Congress, and that is a crime. The problem is that there is a long history of the executive branch refusing to comply with congressional subpoenas on the grounds that they have the power as the executive branch - which is supposed to be separate from the legislative power - that they have, rights as the executive branch not to turn over information or appear to testify when a co-equal branch, which is Congress, demands their appearance. Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro are by far not the first people who were in the executive branch to give a middle finger to Congress when they've issued a subpoena and yet you'd be hard-pressed to find another case where people explicitly were held in contempt of congressional subpoenas, but who were referred to the Justice Department and/or then prosecuted by the Justice Department for it. 

Here, this is a case where the Biden Justice Department took a referral from a Democratic-run committee, the January 6 committee that was created under Nancy Pelosi's speakership, a committee where for the first time in the history of our country, the House speaker rejected the members that the minority, the Republicans, wanted to put on that committee, the first time in history that a House speaker refused to impanel the members of Congress indicated as members of that committee by the House minority leader and instead, as a result, no Republicans agreed to serve on that committee in protest, except for two Republicans, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, who obviously are far more aligned with the Democratic Party when it comes to January 6. So, in effect, it was a full partisan panel and so the Democrats in Congress referred these contempt citations to the Biden Justice Department, which in turn decided to prosecute – something almost unprecedented in our history. 

Let me give you a few similar cases to understand what a complete deviation this is from how things have typically been done in Washington. Here, from CNN, in February 2008, during the Bush administration. 


U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey Friday said he will not ask a federal grand jury to investigate whether two top Bush administration officials should be prosecuted for contempt of Congress.

 

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi Thursday asked Mukasey to look into whether White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and former White House counsel Harriet Miers committed contempt of Congress in the investigation of the 2006 firings of several U.S. attorneys.

Earlier this month, the House voted to find Bolten and Miers in contempt of Congress and pursue charges against them.

The White House argues that forcing the aides to testify would violate the Constitution's separation of powers. (CNN, February 29, 2008)

 

And that has been the longstanding view in Washington, that if Congress orders a private citizen to appear for a legitimate investigation, there are all kinds of limits on what Congress is permitted to investigate. And I think it's extremely questionable whether or not they had the authority to investigate private citizens for January 6, because in general, the only two types of investigations that Congress is permitted to initiate are one, to exercise oversight over the executive branch, and number two, to hold hearings to decide what legislation they want to pass. So, if they're, for example, thinking about legislation related to a certain industry, you call the people in that industry, you call the activists against that industry, and you hear from all the sides, and then you decide what kind of legislation is appropriate. That's one example of when Congress can convene investigative hearings. The other is solely to investigate executive branch officials, it's never to investigate private citizens. And yet, that's exactly what the January 6 committee here did. Those precedents saying that Congress can investigate private citizens for their political views came out of the McCarthy hearings when the Supreme Court – twice – in the 1950s, told Congress that they were vastly exceeding the scope of their investigative powers by trying to investigate and harass people for their political views. And that's exactly what the January 6 Committee did. But even leaving all that partisanship and all that precedent aside, there have been so many other cases where Congress declared a certain executive official to be in contempt of Congress, and it never went to the point where Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro's cases have gone.

 

Here from CBS News, in June 2012, another example:

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One day after the House voted to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress for failing to provide documents relating to the Fast and Furious gunwalking program […] 

 

The White House says Eric Holder, the Obama attorney general, won't be prosecuted for contempt. Many of you may not even remember what that was, but it was a scandal involving the Justice Department whether they were permitting all kinds of serious weapons to come in through the Mexican border through illegal immigration. And the Congress was investigating that Eric Holder refused to turn over documents the House held him in contempt.

White House spokesperson Jay Carney said the criminal prosecution of the contempt charges will not move forward. He said the president's assertion of executive privilege over the related documents makes the matter moot.

In a letter sent to the House Speaker John Boehner, Deputy Attorney General James Cole confirmed that Justice would not move forward with contempt prosecution. (CBS News, June 29, 2012)

 

I'll take you all the way back to 1983, during the first term of the Reagan administration, where you can see just how long standing this  tradition is that has not resulted in these kinds of prosecutions. From The New York Times, March 1983. 



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There you see the headline, the attorney general that was Ronald Reagan's attorney general, William French Smith, defends action by the Justice Department in the contempt case.

 

Under sharp questioning today by Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee, Attorney General William French Smith repeatedly maintained that there was no way to prevent conflicts between the executive and legislative branches like the battle over access to Environmental Protection Agency documents.

 

So Congress was trying to get documents to investigate what the Reagan administration was doing with the Environmental Protection Agency, and EPA officials and others refused to hand them over, claiming that that was the executive prerogative to formulate policy, and Congress had no right to intrude. When William Smith went before Congress and they grilled him on why he wasn't prosecuting them and why the Justice Department was, he said,

 

There is ''built-in conflict'' and tension between the branches, Mr. Smith asserted, adding, ''As long as we have this system of government, I don't see how we can avoid the kind of problem we've had here.''

 

…several committee members, expressing dissatisfaction with Mr. Smith's responses, demanded a guarantee that the House would not be ignored the next time it cited an official in the executive branch for contempt and sought to have the case prosecuted.

 

The dispute involves the Justice Department's action in the contempt case against the head of the environmental agency, Anne McGill Burford, who was cited for refusing to turn over subpoenaed documents. 

 

These are all causing very ancient memories to return from an old political scandal. But this really was the same conflict between the EPA and Congress. The EPA director, Anne Burford, was highly controversial. She was extremely conservative and put in charge of the EPA, was a very pro-industry anti-environmentalist. The House wanted to investigate her and she refused to turn over documents and the Reagan Justice Department refused to prosecute her for it.

 

Representative Peter W. Rodino Jr., the New Jersey Democrat who is chairman of the committee, told Mr. Smith that by law, the United States Attorney had a ''mandatory'' duty to present the contempt case to a grand jury. But he suggested that the department seemed to believe it was free to make its own decision on whether to prosecute. (The New York Times, March 16, 1983)

 

So, just look at how many cases involving Republican and Democratic administrations, where members of the executive branch or people close to the president, refused to turn over information demanded by subpoena to congressional committees who were trying to investigate the executive branch. Typically, because of this notion that the two branches are co-equal, one is not in charge of the other, Nancy Pelosi can't pick up the phone and order Donald Trump to appear before Congress or order his White House chief of staff to appear before Congress. That would make the Congress supreme and not a co-equal branch. And that's why those two branches of government are constantly fighting with one another over when they have to turn over documents. It's an inherent and natural part of our system that has often been resolved politically, but rarely with prosecutions, even when, as in the case of Eric Holder and other instances, Congress declared that official in contempt of Congress, and referred the contempt charges to the Justice Department. 

There's just no denying that these are long-standing precedents in Washington, for better or for worse. Again, I'm against a lot of them, I'd be the first one to party if they were really undone but that's not what's happening here. This is a one-time-only suspension of these long-standing rules, not an abandonment of them, in the name of criminalizing the Trump movement and doing everything to sabotage Donald Trump's attempt to return to office. 

As I suggested at the start, this ethos in Washington was a major part of my journalism for the first ten years. It was a topic on which I focused incessantly, and that was because I had started writing about the War on Terror, and I began to see that a lot of what was being done by the Bush and Cheney administration and the neocons who ran the relevant agencies was not just misguided or dangerous or destructive but was illegal, criminal. That definitely included the way the Bush administration was spying on American citizens without the warrants required by law, something that Congress retroactively legalized in 2008 and that became the FISA  law that now gets renewed all the time and that just got recently renewed to allow spying on American citizens with no warrants but, at the time, it was illegal and criminal. The same is true for torturing detainees, which had always been a crime in the United States, kidnapping with no due process and other similar ones as well. And so every time I was arguing that these were crimes and that they should be prosecuted, what I always heard from longtime journalists and media and the consensus in Washington was that, well, it doesn't really matter if those acts are illegal or not, because here in Washington, we don't prosecute top-level political officials for the acts they've undertaken as part of their executive branch duties. That only happens in Banana Republics. That's called criminalizing policy differences or criminalizing legal disputes between the two branches and you just don't do that, otherwise, you can have a never-ending cycle of retribution where one party is putting the other in prison the minute it gets hold of the levers of the Justice Department. 

One of the first debates I ever had with a classic member of the corporate media was when NBC News’s Chuck Todd, went on the air and basically scoffed at the idea – and this is in 2009, the first year of the Obama administration – that there should be any investigations at all, criminal investigations, of Bush officials or what Bush officials did in the past, CIA officials did, or the NSA did, because this is a distraction, he said. It doesn't really matter. It's not the stuff that Obama should be doing. He should be caring about appearing as a centrist, those sorts of things. In Washington, we just simply don't prosecute prior administrations, and I can't tell you how many columns like that were written, how many TV pundits went on cable news and said that it was the overwhelming consensus. I can't think of anyone in corporate media who believed that President Obama should investigate or prosecute prior acts in the Bush administration. In fact, so intense was the media pressure on Obama, that despite promising repeatedly in the 2008 campaign that he would give it to his attorney general with the instructions to look into it, to criminally investigate it, and to prosecute if there were reasonable grounds for believing crimes were committed, saying, I'm not going to be involved, this is a legal question, nobody's above the law, I'll ask my attorney general to look at it. Two months into office, Obama announced that he was not going to allow any prosecutions of anyone in the prior administration, including in the CIA, for any of these crimes. Pronouncing “It's more important that we look forward than backward,” which never made any sense on its own terms, because all criminal prosecutions, by definition, require looking backward. By definition, their acts were undertaken in the past. When it comes to the prior administration, we're going to adopt the view that we don't look backward, we only look forward for the good of the country or whatever, then it is a complete immunity or exemption for politicians from being prosecuted by the law in the same way that ordinary American citizens are prosecuted. And I was indignant about this. I wrote article after article. I wrote, as I said, the 2011 book arguing against this mindset. 

In 2009, I had a big enough platform that I really couldn't be ignored any longer by people in the corporate media, and so I wrote an article about Chuck Todd's comments and heavily criticized him, and he said, hey, I wish you had talked to me before. And I said, well, I don't think I have the obligation. I'm just criticizing your public remarks. But I'd love to engage you on this. And why don't you come on and we'll do a podcast, and I can ask you questions and you can ask me questions and we'll debate this issue. 

 

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And here you see The Huffington Post, in August 2009, reporting on that debate. I'm just going to give you one passage from this discussion that I had with him to illustrate to you how adamant these people were that we cannot have prosecutions of our political adversaries or our past administrations. 

 

GG: Let me ask you about that, then. If a president can find, as a president always will be able to find, some low-level functionary in the Justice Department -- a John Yoo -- to write a memo authorizing whatever it is the president wants to do, and to say that it's legal, then you think the president ought to be immune from prosecution whenever he breaks the law, as long as he has a permission slip from the Justice Department? I mean, that's the argument that's being made. Don't you think that's extremely dangerous?

 

CT: That could be dangerous, but let me tell you this: Is it healthy for our reputation around the world - and this I think is that we have TO do what other countries do more often than not, so-called democracies that struggle with their democracy, and sit there and always PUT the previous administration on trial - you don't think that we start having retributions on this going forward?

 

Look, I am no way excusing torture. I'm not excusing torture, and I bristle at the attack when it comes on this specific issue. But I think the political reality in this, and, I understand where you're coming from, you're just saying, just because something's politically tough doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. That's, I don't disagree with you from 30,000 feet. And that is an idealistic view of this thing. Then you have the realistic view of how this town works, and what would happen, and is it good for our reputation around the world if we're essentially putting on trial the previous administration? We would look at another country doing that, and say, geez, boy, this is — (The Huffington Post, August 17, 2009)

 

And the reason I was so interested in having this conversation with Chuck Todd is not because he was some aberrational voice in the U.S. media. Just look at this ethos here: “the hardcore reality,” “if you know how Washington works” as you go around prosecuting your political opponents, people in the other party, people from the prior administration,” this is what they had been saying for decades – for decades. It's how they excuse the pardon of Richard Nixon by Gerald Ford, even though the evidence was overwhelming that you could have convicted Richard Nixon of crimes the way you did with many of his top aides, all of whom got pardoned. During the Reagan administration, there was an Iran-Contra scandal that involved highly likely criminality on the part of Reagan officials who wanted to fund the Contras in a civil war in Nicaragua, even though Congress had passed a law saying any funding of the Contras in Nicaragua is illegal and hereby banned. The executive branch ignored that law, but they couldn't get funds from Congress. So, what they did was they sold highly sophisticated missiles and other weapons to Iran, got the cash at the White House in secret accounts, and then sent that money secretly to fund the Contras, even though Congress had said, you can't. A lot of the top officials in the Reagan administration were at risk of being prosecuted, including George Bush, the then-vice president. And the minute George Bush got elected, the first thing he did was issue a pardon of Caspar Weinberger and every other Reagan administration official, and most people in the media applauded that and said, “Yeah, we can't be distracted by these kinds of prosecutions.” 

We can't be prosecuting people in Washington. It's too much of a distraction. It makes us seem like a banana republic. This has been the argument for so long. And if I really believed that this was finally being lifted, and the idea was, look, we're going to prosecute people, no matter how powerful they are in Washington, any time they break the law, I would be the happiest person. I'd be the first one to stand up and cheer. But it's so obvious that's not what's happening. There's no remorse or regret about how this was done previously. The minute Trump is out of the scene, they're going to return right again to this rule. It's a one-time exception only, as so many things are, for abusing and weaponizing the justice system against one person and one person only, and that is Donald Trump. 

 




Nicole Shanahan is in many respects a classic American success story. She grew up in poverty, worked her way through college and Law School, including by working in various, hourly jobs like a maid and a paralegal, and is now a 38-year-old highly respected lawyer in Silicon Valley. She's also one of the richest women in the world, with an estimated net worth of $1 billion that is largely, though not entirely, a result of her marriage to Google co-founder Sergey Brin. But most notable, she is now the running mate of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. If polls are even remotely correct, they will likely be the most significant independent presidential candidacy in many years. 

Many things made Shanahan's choice as vice presidential candidate somewhat notable, including the fact that she had never held political office previously. But that is also true of the man who leads the ticket, RFK, Jr. and was also true of someone named Donald Trump before his 2016 victory. Whatever else is true, she's an extremely interesting person with a very rich and I would say vintage American life. And she also has a robust political trajectory, and we are delighted to welcome her tonight to System Update. 


G. Greenwald: It's great to see you. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us. 

 

Nicole Shanahan: Thanks for having me, Glenn. And just a quick correction: my mom was a maid. But my first job was busing tables, and I just wanted to. 

 

G. Greenwald: I apologize for that, but that story is true, that you did grow up without any advantages, essentially in poverty, had to work your way through college and Law School and built up what you became, which I think everybody can and should respect. Let me start by asking you about just a couple of, I think, crucial issues, including the two wars that our country is currently financing, arming and supporting. The first one is in Ukraine. When I had RFK, Jr. on my show several months ago, we spent a lot of time talking about his view on that war. And since then, the war has gotten even worse, from the perspective of the Ukrainians. I think it's a consensus that the Ukrainian military is in deep trouble, that the Russians are advancing, and that the idea that they could ever expel Russian troops from all of Ukraine is a pipe dream that will never happen. Do you support the ongoing financing by the U.S. government of the war in Ukraine? And if not, what do you think should be done to try and bring about a resolution? 

 

Nicole Shanahan: Well, first of all, this war should have never happened. The United States should have never egged it on as it has. The U.S. has been involved in Ukrainian affairs for decades now. We've been involved in their elections and have been pushing certain kinds of candidates that have been anti-Russia and against normalization of trade and other relationships with Russia. And so the moment that we're in right now, watching Ukrainian lives lost at incredible rates, young men getting dragged into duty who have no interest in fighting and risking their lives, you have the will of the people wanting peace with Russia in this moment. I was devastated when the foreign aid bill went out. Sending an additional, I believe it was $70 billion, to finance this war. At this moment, I think that it is imperative for the United States to understand what is going on. The United States has intentionally aggravated a situation and has continued to escalate it. It is looking at deploying troops. It has allowed the Ukrainian military to use U.S., military supplies. I mean, every day there's a new escalation. That is taking us to a point of a World War III scale risk for our people. And we need to think about what our job is right now. And our job is to take care of this country and not escalate foreign wars. 

 

G. Greenwald: Concerning that last argument that our job as a country, or the government's duty – it seems so basic, but for whatever reason, it has to be debated because so often it's not done – the U.S. government's primary duty is, as you said, to take care of our citizens here at home. Our citizens are suffering. Communities are being ravaged by all kinds of pathologies. People are in economic difficulty. And so, as you say, why should we be sending $60 billion to Ukraine to fuel a highly futile war? I want to know whether you apply that same line of thinking to the billions and billions of dollars that we're sending to Israel to finance and arm its war against Gaza, one that has resulted in more civilian casualties by a long distance than the one in Ukraine. 

 

Nicole Shanahan: I think that the U.S. sending funds to Israel to support the Iron Dome makes a lot of sense. I've supported that in the past. I think, historically, it's been a great way to show support for the state of Israel. I believe October 7 was one of the worst terrorist attacks I've witnessed in my lifetime and might be the worst terrorist attack I will witness in my lifetime. And I do think a response was warranted. I think that when I think about Israel participating in wars of the past and the role that the United States played, you know, I often think of leadership like Golda Meir, who ended the Yom Kippur War, in about a month, and she was fighting on multiple fronts, against multiple armies. And what I see right now happening on the ground in Gaza is devastating. I think there are arguments to be made that we've long past the point of a cease-fire. I think there are lots of arguments to be made that Israel should be showing more restraint. You know, Bobby and I, this is one of the areas that we have the most heated debate. And I think that there's an argument that the United States should have delivered the last aid package to Israel with greater affirmation as to how that money would be spent. We're in a moment right now that I really don't think we should have been in. And you have to go back historically to really look at the United States' involvement in the Middle East. There's a direct line between our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan and Hamas. Israel thinks that - and many others do as well - that a two-state system is not possible in a world in which Hamas is running Gaza. And I tend to agree with that. But is it possible or likely that the Israeli military is going to be successful in destroying Hamas in totality, at this moment? I don't think so. And I think that was actually clear as early as February. And so I think that at this moment, the United States really needs to take responsibility for what it's done to arrive at this moment. And I do think that there needs to be greater coordination, greater levels of sophistication in how we're operating ourselves in the Middle East at this moment. 

 

G. Greenwald: So when you began, you started talking about funding the Iron Dome, which is a purely defensive system that prevents Israel from being attacked with rockets and other types of missiles, but we're not just funding that. We're, of course, funding all their offensive weapons. Most of the bombs being dropped on civilians in Gaza have been made in the USA and the whole world knows that. I guess what I'm wondering is if the advocates of U.S. financing of the war in Ukraine will say: “we're not helping Ukraine conquer territory and we're not helping Ukraine invade other countries either. It's basically like an iron dome. We're just giving them money to defend their country against aggression and invasion by the Russians.” What is the difference between Ukraine on the one hand and Israel on the other, in your view, when it comes to the question of whether we should be financing their wars? 

 

Nicole Shanahan: I think the primary difference is what is being asked for in these conflicts. So, if you look at Russia's history with Ukraine, what is being asked for is the normalization of the trade relationship between Ukrainian leadership and Russia. And tons of historical records show that Russia has been attempting to create a trade route and access point to the Black Sea. And there's a reasonableness there that I think that most people can objectively say this war could have been avoided. I think when you look at what's been going on in Israel and Gaza and you talk to Israelis, they've been fired at, by Hamas, for so many years, and you talk to the average Israeli who's in their 40s, and they've been now drafted into so many different wars. And October 7 is very different - and I'm just speaking morally. October 7 had a very different effect on the consciousness of humanity and I think that certainly, most people would agree that a response was necessary based on the October 7 attack. There was reprehensible behavior. But I think where the majority of people are in their consciousness at this moment as well is very much wishing for greater restraint from Israel, which has an incredibly sophisticated army compared to Hamas. And I think that given the complexity of the region - and, again, the U.S. has contributed a lot to exacerbating this complexity - there are fundamental differences between these two wars. But that being said, neither one needs to continue, as it has been currently, and there are paths to de-escalation available that this administration is fully and capable of executing right now. 

 

G. Greenwald: Let me just switch gears a little bit, when your selection as vice presidential candidate was announced, there was a lot of discourse suggesting or claiming that one of the reasons, if not the main reason for your selection was that you have a great ability to self-finance an independent campaign. I'm somebody who has long said that the way in which the two parties have constructed this kind of duopoly means that the only way you can succeed as an independent candidate is if you have something like a billionaire on the ticket who can fund the campaign. Nonetheless, I just want to understand, was that part of the conversation as part of the selection process, whether or not you were willing to donate money? How much money do you intend to donate to this campaign?

 

Nicole Shanahan: I can't give you an exact dollar amount. We're in June right now. June, historically for independent candidates, has been very challenging. That's usually when the other two parties really ramp up their PR and media spend and most of that media spend typically goes towards taking out the independent candidate first and then, you know, their opposing party candidate. And I am of the belief that this is an election unlike any other. We have a standing president running for reelection who is clearly showing signs of rapid decline. We have another president who has just recently been convicted of a felony. And we've got now an independent candidate who was the only outspoken public figure during a pandemic that was calling out the origins of a virus and calling out government officials and it’s clear that he was entirely correct. So, my involvement and I feel like my responsibility right now, being on this ticket is to first and foremost make sure he's on every single ballot. And I will contribute as much as it takes to make that a reality. 

 

G. Greenwald: I totally respect that and I understand that argument. And like I said, I'm somebody who in the past has said if you want to be an independent candidate, if you want to challenge the two parties, you know, unfortunately, the only way to do that is if you have somebody in the one or the other slots who basically is a billionaire and can self-finance the campaign to compete with the two parties because that's how they've constructed the system. I'm just wondering, though, when people look at your selection and our political system in general, which you have no role in creating, but the idea that very wealthy people obviously have a much bigger say than ordinary Americans in exerting power in Washington and how laws are passed. You've been a big donor for political candidates for quite some time, do you regard the role of big money in politics as a major problem for democracy, and if so, what kind of reforms would you support? 

 

Nicole Shanahan: I think it's a huge problem. I think Citizens United turned this country into a kleptocracy overnight. And I believe that individual donors should certainly have limits and that independents should be free to run without having to spend this kind of money. The ballot requirements that we've seen are arbitrary and ludicrous. Each state is different. Their requirements are crushing. We have an enormous legal team just to deal with that piece. The thing that has made me really excited is that I recently met with somebody at an organization called American Promise and they are going state by state to try to pass a constitutional amendment that would set contribution limits for both individuals and corporations. Twenty-two states have endorsed it, and it seems to be something that Americans want, by a large margin of the population. The grand majority of Americans want there to be limits, and I am one of them. 

 

G. Greenwald: You referenced earlier the recent conviction in the Manhattan courtroom of former president Donald Trump. Today, before speaking to you, I was talking about the order compelling Steve Bannon, the president's former top White House official, to surrender to federal prison on July 1 for contempt of Congress charges, a charge for which people are very rarely imprisoned. Do you see the prosecution of Trump on these specific charges, the one about the accounting irregularities for hush fund payments, and the other prosecutions of so many people around the Trump orbit as a vindication of the rule of law? Or do you think it's an example of Democrats and others in the establishment weaponizing the justice system to attack their political enemies? 

 

Nicole Shanahan: There's been evidence from both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party using the judicial system and the Department of Justice against political opponents. We have become so divided and polarized in this country that there is no branch of government that hasn't somehow been corrupted by these party lines. I think that they've both been guilty. You can point at many areas where Republicans have done similar things and Democrats have done similar. I mean, no greater example is what happened to President Trump. But the case itself, if you are just objectively looking at how the case was conducted, is a hush money trial that didn't have the correct jury instructions in the hands of the jury. And there were just so many things about it that make you really question the objectivity of the Justice Department at this moment. The Justice Department has always been the last resort. It's been that last layer of defense in protecting our civil liberties in this country, normalcy in this country, objectivity, and the rule of law. To have it be toyed with in this way, to have it be manipulated and distorted, I think is the number one thing. It's kind of the last straw for many people in this country; they feel that we've slipped into an autocratic environment where the rule of law is really no longer the rule of law but the rule of the parties. It's incredibly concerning on so many levels. And I think it has a ripple effect as well. 

 

G. Greenwald: So, I referenced earlier the history that you've had as a big dollar donor in politics, from what I can tell, maybe I'm wrong, but the overwhelming majority of your big dollar donations, if not all of them, have gone to Democratic Party candidates, including both kinds of mainstream centrist types like Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, Joe Biden's 2020 presidential campaign, Pete Buttigieg, his presidential campaign, but also […]

 

Nicole Shanahan: And Marianne Williamson. In 2020.

 

G. Greenwald: I was about to say Marianne Williamson. You supported her, as well as some of the reform-minded prosecutors, including in San Francisco, which is a criminal justice reform cause often associated with the left - although Donald Trump was the first president to sign a criminal justice reform in a long time. Nonetheless, you were donating to classic Democrats. You were a registered member of the Democratic Party until this year when you were going to run as an independent. You alluded earlier to President Biden's obvious rapid decline in cognitive function and ability. But is that all that concerns you about Biden and the Democrats, or is there anything else or other things that have caused you to change your mind about the Democratic Party? 

 

Nicole Shanahan: To be completely honest with you, Biden's health is secondary to – and secondary by a long margin – the enormous corruption I've seen in the party. So, in 2020, I didn't support Biden. I supported Hillary but not with enthusiasm. But it was in 2020 that I realized that the Democratic primary had been completely broken. I knew that Bernie was likely to win the primary in 2016. In fact, I think he won. That was the first real big crack in the DNC that I saw. In 2020, it was truly, very obvious that there was no more Democratic primary. No one could run a fair shot at beating the central democratic dynastic line. And it was very clear that Biden was the only one who was going to get a shot at getting on the ticket. My experience, I mean, this would take hours and hours to unpack, but I've had such excruciatingly disappointing experiences with the leadership of the Democrats. I've heard things said to me and I've seen things done that are incredibly contradictory. They're really pathetic in terms of what the party cares about and prioritizes. There's been almost no interest in addressing the root causes of many of this country's biggest issues, including chronic disease and including budget adjustments that need to be made. They throw around money. They want to win at all costs. Once they win, they're not focused on the American people. They are focused on these auxiliary functions of government. And it's very clear that they have built up this enormous kleptocracy in our agencies. There was no way for me to be able to continue, to take any of it seriously. I couldn't support it anymore. And, you know, you said I've previously supported many progressive DAs. I've also recalled DAs as well that didn't do their jobs. The first I DA supported was actually a former police chief. And he did a pretty good job in San Francisco […]

 

G. Greenwald: That was George Gascón, right? 

 

Nicole Shanahan: George Gascón. Yes. A very much liked police officer. He ran on bringing balance to the system and communication and partnership between the DA's office and the police department. But he also wanted to create trust and make sure that there was no bias that could be called into question, and he wanted to make sure that the police department had a lot of integrity and trust. 

 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, I did think the donation to Marianne Williamson was interesting, in part because her major critique is aimed at least as much at the Democratic Party, as the Republican Party. She often sounds like more of an independent candidate criticizing both parties. A lot of times when people who become very disappointed in the Democratic Party come to see them as pathetic as you said – I empathize a lot with that trajectory – a lot of those people still in the back of their mind, believe that at the end of the day, Democrats are still a little bit better than the Republicans. In this case, I guess, especially under Donald Trump. Is that a view that you share - that if there were no independent candidate, if there were only Democrats or Republicans, that people should vote for the Democratic Party? Are you not prepared to say that one is better than the other at this point? 

 

Nicole Shanahan: I think that there is a clear uniparty and nothing made that more obvious than the way Congress came together in this last session. There is no way that I could swing over and support Donald Trump. I know too much about his record. He had a Raytheon lobbyist running the secretary of defense. He had his loyalists, which represented all kinds of corporate interests, fill his cabinet. He hasn't blinked twice about the fact that he was responsible for Operation Warp Speed had enabled Fauci very blindly to go ahead and conduct the pandemic response. He intentionally pulled the investigation on Pfizer. He's done so many things that, you know, that are just as pitiful as the Democratic Party has done. You know, I like Liberty Republicans. I think that if there's some future where the two-party system returns to any sense of sanity, I could see myself becoming a Liberty Republican alongside individuals like, you know, I think Thomas Massie has done great things for this country. I think that Ron Paul's done incredible things for this country. I think Rand Paul has been really fighting the good fight for this country. And then I also see some good progressives, you know, I think Dean Phillips, has done some very good and interesting things as well. So there are still signs that the two parties can be salvaged. I don't know that we will get there, though, if we just keep doing these huge swings. And, you know, my theory right now is that Trump is peaking, in large part, due to the help of the Democrats and the general understanding in America that the judicial system has been corrupted to support Democrats in this election by prosecuting Trump. But that backfired on them. He's raised over $100 million since the conviction. 

 

G. Greenwald: I just have a couple of more questions in the little bit of time that we have left. I want to respect your time. So, I have a lot of questions for you to come back on, but, for now, I want to ask you about this: since 2016, when there was this sort of trauma to the system of the establishment, Donald Trump's victory over Hillary Clinton, but also Brexit, there's been this kind of systematic attempt to gain control over the kind of information and speech that is permitted to flow on the Internet. There have been governments around the world, including our own government and our intelligence agencies, who have created excuses to either censor the Internet directly or to coerce Big Tech platforms to do it for them. Usually, the justifications are things like, well, we have to combat disinformation as if the government can decree truth and falsity, or we have to combat hate speech or things that are some kind of a threat to our national security. Where do you fall in that debate? Do you believe that there are any reasons that the government or Big Tech should be censoring political speech or on the Internet, other than in obvious cases where crimes are being committed, like fraud or things like that, but when it comes to political speech, do you support the censorship or suppression of any of those views? 

 

Nicole Shanahan: I mean, you can't love this country and also support the censorship. I love this country very deeply. I love this country because of the Constitution. I, in part, went to Law School because of the fact that I believe so deeply in the power of the Constitution to protect individual liberties. And I believe these basic liberties, such as freedom of speech, are what make this country, the country that it is, a country of hope, a country of honor, a country of innovation, a country of living out one's dream. The censorship that has occurred since 2016, especially with the use of AI to censor speech automatically, and these large language models, which are programmed specifically to demarcate categories of speech that will be automatically banned, has been one of the reasons why – I'm sitting here in Silicon Valley right now – I have decided to rebel against Silicon Valley. Part of me joining Bobby Kennedy's ticket is this rebellion. Bobby Kennedy has been censored more than any political candidate in my lifetime that I'm aware of. And I have joined this ticket in part because I am an insider. I know how this happened. I saw it happen. I know why it's happened, and I know exactly how to unwind it. And if given the opportunity, I will on my first opportunity, go into these agencies and take out and disable all of these AI censors. I will also understand the exact points of, you know, government capture of the corporations and the Big Tech platforms. They have, you know, it's not just use or coerce. It's a combination of coercion and knowing and willful partnership. And I've seen it. 

 

G. Greenwald: Yeah. That is interesting that you kind of come from it with that perspective. And so much of the censorship is done by AI. 

All right. Last question. When I had Bobby Kennedy on my show, he said that one of the things he would support almost immediately was pardoning both Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, both of whom have essentially been turned into dissidents for the crime of exposing the crimes of the secret part of our government, the U.S. Security State. Do you agree with that position? And more importantly, how do you see the dangers posed by that part of our government that has no democratic accountability, that works in complete secrecy, that's independent of any party change that we might vote for the CIA, the NSA? How do you see that part of the government? 

 

Nicole Shanahan: Ron Paul said in his libertarian convention speech that there was a coup when JFK was assassinated. And I don't think there's any candidate in history that is going to be able to unravel the shadow government more than Bobby Kennedy, Jr. can and will do. I am fully supportive of the need for that. I think that it is critical to reclaim this nation as a free and stable republic. Assange is a hero. And I think that what he has done through this broader cypherpunk movement is to protect the Internet, which is where most Americans, and especially young Americans, are living out their lives today. It is a forum of engagement, exchanging information, building companies and building coalitions. And if the Internet is not a free place, for people to be able to expose and have conversations about what is going on with their governments, then we've lost the most dominant speech we have, which is, you know, the speech that we have over digital platforms. So, I believe Assange is 100% a hero and it is so necessary. Trump had a chance to do it and he didn't. And I don't understand why he didn’t, because, to me, one of the most obvious and easy decisions he could have made was to pardon Assange. Snowden is a whistleblower. We are a country that has historically protected overseas whistleblowers. Why do we prosecute our own? It's incredibly hypocritical. 

 

G. Greenwald: Well, Miss Shanahan, you gave us a lot of your time. I found the conversation very interesting. We'd love to have you back on, at some point in the future. And I really appreciate your taking the time to talk to us tonight. 

 

Nicole Shanahan: Thanks for having me. It was nice to meet you as well. 

 

G. Greenwald: You too. Have a good evening. 

 

So that concludes our show for this evening. 

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Briahna Joy Gray on Dems in Disarray, the "Big Beautiful Bill," Biden Cover-Up Receipts and More; Plus: Interview with Journalist Katie Halper
System Update #461

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Glenn Greenwald is away this week. 

I’m Briahna Joy Gray, the guest host for this episode. 

You might know me from my own podcast, “Bad Faith,” or from my previous hosting responsibilities over at The Hill’s “Rising,” less of a free speech platform than this one. 

Today, I'll be walking through the implosion of the Democratic Party, the pathetic hunt for a Joe Rogan of the left, the party's instinct for corporate self-preservation over real populist reform and the media cover-up of Biden's cognitive decline. 

Afterward, I'll be joined by independent left podcaster and co-host of “Useful Idiots” podcast, Katie Halper, to continue the conversation about how the DNC is continuing to try to rig elections in favor of incumbents, even as they repeatedly keep dying in office, and the likelihood that there might be more independent third-party runs in 2028, a la RFK Jr.'s 2024 attempt. Now, let's get right into it. 

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For a decade now, corporate Democrats have been warning that Donald Trump presents an existential threat to the Republic. During Trump's first term, much of that handwriting seemed to be hyperbolic – Trump derangement syndrome, if you will. His big legislative accomplishment was in line with the policy priorities of your typical establishment Republican: a $1.7 trillion tax cut that went overwhelmingly to the rich.

There was some good stuff too: unlike Biden, he didn't start any new wars. While he continued to fund Israel's genocide in Gaza and crack down on free speech rights of Americans who protested the said genocide, Trump did accomplish the temporary cease-fire that AOC merely claimed Kamala was “working tirelessly” to achieve. 

But now that President Trump is finally following through on some of his less popular and less populist policy commitments, like the Medicaid cuts, included in his Big Beautiful Bill, which passed the House last week, or throwing markets into disarray with his erratic application of tariffs, which can be good policy.

Establishment Democrats seem almost happy to have something to justify their hatred of Trump. So, you see, the less populist Trump behaves, the more it disguises the Democrats' own failure to meet the needs of the people. Some Democrats are outright advising that the way they should respond to this alleged “existential crisis” is to simply do nothing: Just sit back and wait to benefit from the backlash. 

You don't have to take my word for it: Listen to a veteran DNC advisor, James Carville, describe the strategy: 

Video. James Carville, The View. February 18, 2025.

Fiddle while Rome burns, the expert says, then exploit the tragedy. 

But so far, the backlash isn't coming. A new Economist/YouGov poll, out yesterday, shows that while GOP favorability is low, at negative 11%, Democrats are doing even worse, at negative 21%; 41% of Americans still view Republicans favorably, while a mere 36% of Americans view Democrats favorably. 

These polls come as no surprise to those of us who consume independent media. I mean, just look around: Democrats are in the throes of a credibility crisis that arose out of Joe Biden's obvious unfitness to run for president. 

They're trying to distract from their complicity and the cover-up, but going all in on the idea that it was Biden himself, his family, and his closest advisors that hid his decline from the party and the public until it was too late, not the liberal media. But it's hard to call Biden's infirmary a “cover-up” when it was out in the public for all of us to see and comment on. The president was confusing Haifa and Rafah, mixing up the president of Egypt and the president of Mexico, and even dodged culpability in the classified documents case on the basis that he didn't have the mental competence to knowingly take the files. 

He even seemed to wander off at the G7 Conference a year ago, like a distracted child. 

Video. Joe Biden, The Economic Times. June 14, 2024.

His mental lapses were evident as far back as the 2020 primary, during which presidential candidates Julian Castro and Cory Booker had the temerity to call him out for not remembering what he had just said at the primary debate. This clip is from way back in 2019, when Dems still could have avoided the albatross of a historically old and declining candidate around their necks. What did they do instead? Disappear both Castro and Booker, once rising stars from the ranks of up-and-coming leadership. 

Video. Cory Booker, CNN. September 13, 2019.

You heard it there. The mainstream media accused anyone who noticed Biden's obvious decline of being motivated by Trump-like conservative politics. “Believe our Trump derangement syndrome, not your lying eyes,” they seem to say. 

Reuters reported the story about Biden wandering off at the G7 as “lacking context.” Meanwhile, his inability to finish sentences was “contextualized” as a mere stutter. 

Jake Tapper, one of the authors of the book “Original Sin,” which sheds light on the extent of Biden's mental infirmity, was himself one of the original apologists for Biden's cognitive decline. A few good mainstream pundits on MSNBC question the co-author on Tapper's own complicity. 

Video. Alex Thompson, MSNBC, May 26, 2025.

That was some good questioning. And I got to say, I don't think we need medical degrees to be able to accurately observe what was going on with Joe Biden. We didn't need this new book to know the truth either. Independent media, along with the voters, knew what was been going on for years. 

Biden's midterm rating was worse than any other elected president on record and, back in August 2023, polls show that 77% of Americans, including 69% of Democrats, thought Biden was too old to be president. But Democrats wouldn't listen. Or rather, they simply didn't care. 

Now, as part of the media's effort to whitewash its own complicity, the same media figures who were involved in the cover-up are claiming, well, they had to defend Biden's mental competency because no one else primaried him. They were stuck with him as a candidate. This, even as the party shut down the possibility of a primary from the jump. 

Contrast former DNC chair, Jamie Harrison, making that incredible claim that anyone could have primaried Biden if they wanted to, followed by Biden/Harris spokesperson turned MSNBC “journalist,” Symone Sanders, proclaiming that under no circumstances will there be a primary. 

Video. Jaime Harrisson, Symone Sander, MSNBC. 

“If folks wanted to primary Joe Biden, there was nobody to tell them that they couldn't?” Is he serious? The mendacity is frankly shocking. As Symone admitted, Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson did throw their hats in the ring, as said RFK Jr., and you can hear how much respect they got for doing so reflected in Symone's smite tone and her inability to pronounce Marianne's name. Then don't forget, RFK Jr. also ran as a Democrat before the party pushed about and it's no surprise why he left the Dems.

 The Democratic Party, its pundits and politicians, were simply all behind Joe Biden, no matter how ill-fated his electoral chances were from the get-go. And while they want to memory hole their role in setting Dems up to fail, I have the receipts. 

Take “Pod Save America,” one of the most popular liberal podcasts in the country. These former Obama speech writers turned media moguls finally admitted that Biden wasn't fit to lead after Biden's disastrous debate with Trump. But the hindsight is 2020. Listen to how hostile they were in conversation with moderate primary candidate, Democrat Dean Phillips, when he joined their show during the primary season that wasn't. 

Video. Phillips, Pod Save America. November 20, 2023.

Phillips and I do not share the same politics, but he was right. At a certain point, internal polls show that Biden could not win. According to “Original Sin,” the Jake Tapper book, Biden traded trails rather in every battleground state, and the race that tightened in states he won comfortably back in 2020. But the voters don't matter, the polls don't matter, not to Democrats. What matters to the Democratic Party elites is who they choose to top the ticket. 

As Bernie Sanders’s former national press secretary in 2020, I know this all too well. In two back-to-back election cycles, the Democratic Party ignored polls that showed Bernie was more electable than Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden against Donald Trump. 

Now, this is not some Monday morning quarterbacking from a disgruntled leftist. Democratic Party insider Donna Brazile admitted the primary was rigged back in 2017.

Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson admit as much in “Original Sin.”  They admit it! The election was rigged. But even with all of the faux mea culpas happening around Biden's lack of mental fitness, the Democrats STILL refuse to act any differently going forward, to learn a lesson from their past mistakes. Tapper and Thompson write that Bernie was perceived to be unable to attract Black voters, but Bernie was the only candidate in 2020 who matched Biden's popularity with that group, while also outstripping the field when it came to Latino voters

Bernie remains popular. Not only have he and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez been turning out tens of thousands of voters across the country during their anti-oligarchy tour, including in deep red states. Bernie's recent appearance on the “Flagrant” podcast, with Andrew Schultz, had a whole room of popular podcast “Bros” clamoring for the exact “democratic socialism” establishment Dems insisted would turn off the public!

Everybody's saying it. Look, it seems obvious that left populism is the way for Democrats to push back against Trump's right populism, which unfortunately, is increasingly informed by the tech billionaires that fund his campaign rather than the working-class real populists who voted him into office. You've got to ask yourself, is pardoning reality TV stars convicted of tax fraud really improving your ability to support your family? 

What about growing the military budget (and the deficit) at the same time while cutting special education funding? 

What about shifting wealth from the bottom 60% of working-age households to the top income brackets? 

Look, no matter what your politics are, two parties that are competing for the support of working-class Americans instead of aligning with corrupt billionaires would be a good thing! But you can't convince someone of something they're paid not to understand. Which is why Democrats are, instead of embracing popular policies like Medicare for all or a tax on billionaires, are choosing to spend millions of dollars to figure out how to, get this, speak to American men. I really wish I were kidding here.

You really can't make this stuff up. Dems are obsessed with finding the Joe Rogan of the left, but they could not be barking up a wronger tree. 

Hilariously, they seem to be tapping one of their most insidious surrogates, Oliva Juliana, to “message better” on men while continuing to treat Sanders – the man who was literally endorsed by the actual Joe Rogan back in 2020 – as a pariah. 

Video. James Carville, The Daily Beast. May 2025.

To be clear, Carville hasn't won an election since Bill Clinton in the ‘90s, but I digress. 

The reason why Democrats’ mission to find their own Joe Rogan will fail is obvious: to be a credible interlocutor in the political space, you have to be willing to say the true thing when it's hard, even when it is critical of your party. Especially when it's critical of your party. The popular “Manosphere” podcaster, Andrew Schultz, gets it. 

Video. Andrew Schultz, Flagrant.  May 28, 2025.

Even on MSNBC, a guest of Ayman's show was also able to identify the core issue here. 

Video. Ayman Mohyeldin, MSNBC. May 24, 2025.

See, right there at the end is a great summary of the impossibility of what Democrats think they're going to achieve. “We need an authentic voice that's going to become popular organically, and we need to control them.” 

Good luck with that, Democrats. Good luck with that. 

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Briahna Joy Gray: Back with Katie Halper. You know her from the “Katie Halper” podcast and as co-host of “Useful Idiots” with Aaron Maté. Welcome to System Update. 

Katie Halper: Thanks, Brie. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Katie, it's a pleasure. I can't wait to pick your brain about some of the viral clips, especially from the sort of Manosphere podcast arena that have gone viral precisely because of how well Bernie Sanders himself and his ideas have translated into his sphere, that Democrats have insisted were so right-wing and so far gone, and they spent so many years vilifying but now seem to be trying to enter into those kinds of spaces. What do you make of it? 

Katie Halper: I think it's funny because, of course, Bri, not to be self-promoting, but they're searching for the – what is it? – left-wing Joe Rogan. What about Briahna Joy Gray and Katie Halper to take the mantle? 

It is ironic that the same people who were throwing Bernie under the bus, smearing him, attacking him, are now saying that he has some kind of messaging that's good for the democrats. There's always this obsession with messaging over content and program, but that's kind of another issue. 

I think people continue to smear Bernie Sanders but to the extent that they are praising him, they're praising him now because they know he's not going to run. So, I think they think it's safe for them to praise his ideas because they actually are either just paying lip service to it or they are afraid of Bernie's more progressive stances that challenge the status quo. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yeah. I think that really gets to the core of the issue that the Democratic Party for years has managed to try to frame themselves as somehow different than the establishment wing of the Republican Party, despite having, substantively, the same corporate donors by leaning and going all in on identity politics.

There's been a backlash against that. They're saying, okay, well, now we've got to find some other messaging prong when the whole reason why they went all in on identity politics and now we're going all in this idea that they just get the right man who's lift enough weights to say the right thing that they will also be able to compete, it's because they're allergic, their corporate base makes them allergic to actually advancing the kind of ideas that made Bernie popular in the first place acting like this guy was somehow a ball of charisma as much as I liked his sort of like a grumpy straightforward persona. He wasn't winning hearts and minds because he was a charm generator. It was because, as Joe Rogan himself said when he was endorsing Bernie Sanders back in 2020, he's a man who's been saying the same thing for the last 40 years, and he has credibility. He's trustworthy. And it's amazing to rewatch that endorsement now that the Democrats are in the middle of this incredible credibility crisis. 

I want to ask you specifically about this book, “Original Sin,” by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson. I don't know if you had seen that clip before, that super cut that Ayman put together on MSNBC of Jake Tapper doing exactly what is sort of criticized in this book, although I will say this book stays away mostly from media criticism and focuses on the idea that it was Biden in his inner circle that knew the truth and were just lying to everybody else and everybody else was sort of deceived by them, including the liberal media. What do you make of that sort of framing there? Is Jake Tapper really innocent in all of this? 

Katie Halper: I mean, I joke that Jake Tapper was well-positioned to write a book about a cover-up because he participated in the cover-up. So, he does probably have some inside knowledge and real insight into it. But no, I mean, you alluded to this and the mashup that I'm in proves this. Jake Tapper was doing the exact kind of cover-up and running of interference that you and I have commented on the media doing for Joe Biden, for the DNC, for centrist Democrats, that we know that they do, they love to do. And so, it is rich seeing someone who participated in that cover-up profiting off of a book about a cover-up and he's hawking that product on his shows and on the various CNN shows that he appears on and all the appearances he's been doing. And I think at the end, once again, it's fine for people to have the eureka moments in hindsight. Somehow, it never happens in real time. And he keeps making these media appearances and talking about how he has a great humility, and his co-writer talks about the humility, which is, I guess, as close as to a mea culpa that we'll get, but that's not, I'm always so frustrated when people say humility like they always do these humble brags. I'm truly humbled by, insert whatever praise, so that's just a little pet peeve I have with that word. 

But, yeah, I think that Jake Tapper, like much of the media, keeps making the same mistakes. They're warmongers for every war. I mean, the cover-up, is disgusting but another disgusting thing is that he has spread so many lies about Palestinians and has run so much interference, much like he ran so much interference for the Biden campaign, he's running so much interference for IDF and he and Dana Bash have done such a disgusting job at vilifying Palestinians, Palestinian Americans like Rashida Tlaib, but all Palestinians, and taking every single rumor and fabricating a narrative and running with it and never correcting it. 

Tapper and Dana Bash pushed the mass rape Hamas narrative that has been totally debunked; they've never corrected it and, at the same time, they've ever once acknowledged the fact that there's video footage of Israeli soldiers raping a Palestinian,  – what I would call hostage, what our media calls prisoner or detainee, but I think, to be consistent we should say hostage – and it's one thing to push a debunked narrative and never correct it, but at least acknowledge the fact that we do know of people who are raped by Israelis, but the fact they don't acknowledge that and that this is something that mainstream Israeli media covers shows that they really don't care about sexual violence. They don't about rape and they're happy to be doing PR for a genocidal state. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yeah, I think it's a really…

Katie Halper: Sorry, we're talking about cover-ups, but they're related. 

Briahna Joy Gray: No, I think that's a really important point because there is something deeply ironic and dissonant about Jake Tapper in particular. I don't know that Alex Thompson and it could be similarly described as hypocritical, but Jake Tapper for sure, go doing the press rounds about a cover-up while still actively participating in a misinformation campaign, at least as significant as the lies about the Steele dossier or claiming that Hunter Biden's laptop was misinformation. I mean, someone else had another super cut sort of juxtaposing what he's saying now about Hunter Biden with what he said back then about Hunter Biden and framing any and every criticism of Joe Biden or just observation from people who actually love Joe Biden, that doesn't seem to be up to his best, he's not the same Joe Biden who was vice president back in 2008/2012 cycles, as somehow being Trumpy as though supporting Donald Trump, even if that were your perspective, precludes you from seeing the truth with your own eyes. And Katie, this is what's so frustrating about Democrats, and frankly, my concern with some folks on the left who seem to be taking this sort of measured praise for the enthusiasm Bernie and AOC are capturing on these anti-oligarchy tours and predicting that there's going to be real change to the Democratic Party this time, how optimistic are you that we're likely to see the Democrats learning from the lessons of the past? And if not, why aren't you optimistic? 

Katie Halper: Right. Yeah, I mean, I think that, unfortunately, the Democrats would really rather lose to Trump than have someone like Bernie in power. But you're asking a slightly different question, right? You're kind of saying, well, what suggests that the Democrats will deliver anything, even with this good messaging that Bernie and AOC are bringing? And certainly, they leave a lot to be desired when it comes to Gaza, but, sure, on economic issues, Bernie, especially, is excellent. 

I think that the problem is, and you've spoken a lot about this, Bri, it's great to have fresh ideas, fresh policies, fresh but also consistent. I mean, as you alluded to earlier, Bernie's been saying the same thing for decades and that is something that I think has endears him justifiably to lots of people. But the question is, will the Democratic Party actually allow for any of these policies to take hold? [audio problems]

So, there's a lot of rotating villain phenomenon, right? 

So, I think that the Democrats really love to pretend that they can't get things done, that they'd love to get things done. But the truth is they just don't want to get them done. They don't want to see these things because they're as beholden to their donors as the Republicans are, they're just better on social issues often. And to the extent that they're better on social issues, they certainly are willing to sacrifice these social issues in the name of fundraising, which is why, for instance, neither Obama nor Biden codified Roe v. Wade. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yeah. I’m glad you brought up Roe v. Wade because I have more optimistic folks, left side of the aisle saying, “Oh, no, this didn't waste strategy, whatever you think of it, it's likely to work” because look at how well Joe Biden did in midterms.” And I think in retrospect, and I think some of us at the time reported that we suspected that there was not a red wave in 2022, it was not a signal that voters were actually secretly happy with Joe Biden. Polls at the time showed, as I said in my radar, that he had historically low favorability at that time. What people were coming out to vote for was not Joe Biden; it was for Roe v. Wade. It was to express their discontent with Roe being overturned and anti-abortion laws being put into effect in all the country. And a lot of red states like Kansas, bipartisan majorities came out to defend those kinds of formerly constitutional rights. 

I want to ask you, though, about this particular clip where Chuck Todd, even someone who is very much an establishment pundit, seems to think and maybe even seems to hope that there will, unlike 2024, when the Democrats completely shut down a primary, that there will not just be a primary, but that there'll be independent third-party style candidates, a la RFK Jr., running in that race. Let's take a look. 

Video. Chuck Todd, The Chuck Toddcast. May 27, 2025.

Briahna Joy Gray: I don't even know where to start with that, Katie. Why a military guy? Why this Bill McRaven person, who apparently is the former chancellor of the University of Texas system? And why the optimism that we're going to have someone operating outside of the two-party system, from this person who is very much an establishment pundit? 

Katie Halper: Right. And who really, I think, took part in a mocking of third-party candidates that so much of the corporate media took part in. I think that it's interesting you asked about why it has to be a military figure. And I think this speaks to how much the media and our political elites are so obsessed with optics and messaging and so inattentive to substance. So, it's not about what this person's going to offer. It's not about the changes that they're going to bring to people's lives in any qualitative or meaningful way. It's about whether they can tap into people's, I don't know, like, crushes on military figures or tap into our militaristic society. It does have a bizarre obsession, I think, with optics that, again, I think is because no one who is powerful, no political or media elites actually want to see real changes. So, they just want to have kind of like different presentations that get people excited, but nobody wants to see the actual changes happen. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yes. It’s a different kind of identity politics. It's the same thing as, like, yeah, like the Joe Rogan of the left thing. It's like they think that they can find a podcaster who lifts enough weights. I guess that's why we're just disqualified Katie. We're not, we don't lift heavy… 

Katie Halper: Yeah, I know. I do a lot of repetition of light weights, right? 

Briahna Joy Gray: Right. It's totally vibe-based. 

Now look, of course, there is a, like a substantive claim for having a veteran, but I think it also misses the mainstream pundits' missing how much we are in a sort of anti-interventionist/isolationist/anti-war moment in both parties. And that's exactly why someone like Trump, who definitely ran as an anti-interventionist and didn't start any new wars, at least in his first term, was so popular. So them saying a military guy, I mean, I think someone like Matthew Ho, who ran on the Green Party for a Senate in North Carolina some years back, could be exactly that kind of guy because he served and learned from his service exactly why we shouldn't be sending troops to fight pointless wars and ruining lives all because young kids see no other avenue to access things like healthcare and a quality education. That could be your guide, but we know Chuck Todd isn't going to throw his hat in behind a Green Party leftist, kind of Bernie-style candidate like Matthew Ho. 

Katie Halper: Right. I mean, I think you're right that it would be great to have a military figure who was anti-war. I mean those are extremely powerful voices and they have a lot of credibility and, of course, more importantly they're anti-war which is something that wins votes, but also is obviously good for the planet and good for all people on the planet, except for people who work in the arms industry and people who support genocide. 

But I think that it is interesting to see people again, the very same people, who, I mean, I think it was Chuck Todd who said Bernie Sanders would get “hammered and sickled,” he actually said that to him, see them act poetic about working outside of the duopoly. They acknowledge that the two-party system doesn't work, but what were they doing except for running interference for this two-party system? 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yeah, absolutely. And just as the final nail in the coffin, which is perhaps a metaphor, now that I said it out loud, that's in poor taste. If we pull up the graphic, a significant number of Democrats who have quite literally died in office, a margin that would have prevented the Democrats or enabled the Democrats to block the passage of Biden's big, beautiful budget bill in the House had they stayed alive. 

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Now, remember, DNC vice chair David Hogg got an enormous amount of pushback simply saying you wanted to start a pack that funded challengers to incumbents, observing accurately that younger members of the party like AOC and people who are outsiders like Bernie Sanders are the ones that have managed to capture whatever energy is left in the husk of the Democrat Party. And for that, Democrat elites have rallied the ranks to literally push him out of his position at the DNC and are frankly using sort of identity politics as a lever to get him out. Even as Democrats are unable to whip sufficient votes to block win priorities, precisely because their members are so old and enfeebled that they are quite literally dying in office. What do you make of it? 

Katie Halper: Yeah, I mean, of course, the final nail in the coffin was the perfect turn of phrase. But what better represents the narcissism and selfishness and moribund nature of the Democrats than the way that they are refusing to resign? Because, again, the Democrats are constantly fearmongering – and I want to be clear, I mean, Trump is something to be feared. I mean, he's not an anti-war candidate. He is terrible for many reasons.  The Democrats often criticize him for the things that aren't even that bad, which is another irony. But they say he's an existential threat, he's a fascist and yet if they're so worried about this, why don't they retire so that they have a better chance of having someone from the Democratic Party who can vote against his bill? I mean literally, his bill passed because Democrats refused to resign despite having been very sick or old. It reminds me also of the way that if Kamala Harris cared so much about defeating Trump, if this was the most important election ever, then why didn't she listen to the base, which was clamoring for her to depart from Biden on several issues and most notably on Gaza. We know now from someone who worked with her, it was because she didn't want to be rude, and it's not, it's gauche to depart from your president's policies when you're the running mate. 

We also know that Joe Biden said, I don't want any daylight between us, kid. And so, for Biden, his legacy, much like these Democrats who are dying in office, their legacies are more important than defeating Trump and Trumpism or helping the people that they claim to serve. For Kamala, I guess, ruffling feathers was more important– or not upsetting donors, or not being able to run around with Liz Cheney, or not incurring the wrath of AIPAC. So, it just belies the whole claim that this is something that is an existential threat. 

I think that I mean we are facing existential threats. We're facing existential threats that neither party is willing to deal with, especially when it comes to climate change. But it's very hard to convince people that you're taking this seriously as an existential threat when you don't do the minimal things needed to either win an election or prevent a Republican from taking your seat in the case of people who are not resigning. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yeah, it's really hard, frankly, to see in concurrent election cycles the voting population stand up and clearly, clearly be clamoring for a legitimate, sincere populism. I mean, the outrage around inflation, cost of living, housing prices, gas prices, food prices, education prices. These are the sectors that are driving inflation and which are causing life to be so precarious for so many Americans and it's nice now that Democrats are like acknowledging that economic precarity, economic anxiety is a real thing because for I don't know like eight years after the 2015-2016 cycle they acted if you said well yeah people voted for Trump because of economic anxiety they said that oh that's just racism that's just a synonym for racism we won't take that argument so now they're finally embracing it and trying to say we're going to do a Joe Rogan sort of a situation. But again, they're not backing any of those policies. You're still getting Democrats out here arguing against baseline things like raising the minimum wage, which hasn't been raised since Bush was in office. The longest period without a minimum wage raise since it was invented in like the 1930s.

And meanwhile, Americans are struggling. So this huge lane is opening up. Meanwhile, on the right side of the aisle, I think people who voted for Donald Trump in good faith hoping that he was going to follow the sort of banded wing of his party and do real economic populism are seeing that Bannon is engaged in a battle with the other wing of the party that frankly bought the election, the tech wing, the Elon Musk's, the Marc Andreessen's, the folks who are very openly saying, “We need to do AI, we need to put the public out of business, we're going to make all of these arguments that legitimize defunding the welfare state that so many Americans, including so many American in very low-income red states in the South and elsewhere, are relying upon to survive.”

And we can do that because we literally bought this election. And I'm afraid that that tech wing, the billionaire wing, who has no alignment and interest with the working-class in this country, most of whom are frankly not even American or relatively recent transplants are going to win out and it's going to be too late for a genuine populism to actually restore a democracy that reflects people's values. What do you think? 

Katie Halper: I think it's a justifiable fear. And I think what you're saying it really does ring true. Again, we've seen in the cases of the leadership of both parties, we have seen a real embrace of anti-populism, right? And one of the most frustrating things was to see people equate Bernie Sanders with Donald Trump because there's a big difference between actual populism and pseudo populism, just like there's a big difference between being anti-war and being pseudo-anti-war. And Trump is great at appealing to populist sentiments. But of course, he's not someone who cares about the working class, the middle class. He is someone who, in some ways, is more dangerous than traditional Republicans because he talks a good talk. He knows how to sound like he's a populist. He knows how to sound like he's against the status quo. But of course, in some ways, the most dangerous thing to have is someone who substantively is status quo, but performatively and stylistically is not. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yeah, it is interesting to see float things like, we’re going to do a tax on the rich, right? But then walk it back. And you can read that in a couple of different ways. You can say Donald Trump is just a bad faith actor. He never met in the first place, or you can write it as, well, he actually is the one who's got a good sense of what the wind is blowing and what the base wants. And maybe he would be happy to do a little bit. He's a billionaire himself.  I wouldn't take it too far that he was willing, would be willing to do too redistributive justice to return the hard working, increased productivity of the working-classes back into their pockets the way that it was 50 years ago or so before a bunch of laws redistributed it to the very top, including Trump's own 2017 tax cuts. I won't take it too far, but there's a way you could read it that says, well, maybe Trump did get a sense that you need bread and roses. You need to get the masses a little bit to keep them on your team and that the corporate interests within his own party won't even let him do the bare minimum. And so, it's not clear to me how much there is a real war between the Steve Bannon's who seem to be more genuinely committed to working-class politics, even if it's also mixed in with sort of a nativism and some other unsavory aspects that I personally don't agree with. And this is like the raw, open, we don't need workers anymore. We're going to do AI, we're going to feed you cricket slop and you're going to like it, we don't even need humanity, we're to be on the moon types. And like my concern, I don't know how to read it, but if I had to pick, I would much rather the Steve Bannon's – I can't believe I'm saying this, but I would rather the Steve Bannon’s wing of the Republican Party went out. The problem is the Steve Banning wing of the Republican Party didn't spend half a billion dollars electing Donald Trump. 

Katie Halper: Right. And I think he also doesn't appeal to certain segments, demographically speaking, who are very powerful. I mean, again, I think that it is kind of a funny thing to say, I hope that Steve Bannon wins. But of course, I do think that populists, you can work across the aisle with economic populists on certain issues, whereas there's nothing you can work with Elon Musk types about, right? They are scarier in many ways, and their policies are scarier, and there's very little overlap between the populist left and the populist right, to the extent that you can even have a populist right. But yeah, certainly I think that the Elon Musk wing is more frightening than the, I mean, they're both frightening, but yeah, I guess if. I mean, Bri, you're not someone who likes the lesser of two evils, but maybe that's the furthest I can say is that Steve Bannon is the lesser of two evils when it comes to the Bannon wing or the Elon Musk wing. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Amen to that. I can't disagree, Katie. I really appreciate your willingness to talk through some of this with me. This was cathartic for me because watching all of this happen in real time has been difficult. I appreciate the opportunity to talk about it with you, talk about it here on Glenn's amazing platform, and to continue to follow the Democrats' self-destruction cycle and incredible cope over their complicity and the great Biden cover-up. Thank you, Katie.

Katie Halper: Thank you, Thanks, Bri. Thanks Glenn.

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Glenn Takes Your Questions on the Trump Admin's War with Harvard, Fallout from Wednesday's DC Killing, and More; Plus: Lee Fang on Epstein's Dark Legacy in the USVI
System Update #460

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

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Tonight: There was major news this week, and we always try to devote our Friday night show to covering as much of that as possible, both through our “Week in Review” segment as well as the Q&A session, where we take questions from our Locals members and get to as many of them as we can. As always, we have a wide range of very probing questions from our followers on Locals – I'd expect nothing less from my viewers – and we'll try to answer as many of those as we can. 

Before we do that, we talk to the friend of the show, the intrepid independent journalist, Lee Fang, about numerous issues this week, including a new article he published on his Substack which investigates how officials in the Virgin Islands, where Jeffrey Epstein's notoriously bought that island, have been fraudulently profiting from victim funds and the residue from his presence. 

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Our guest tonight to help us go over some news events of the week as well as some investigative reporting that he has published this week, is a good friend of the show the independent journalist I've worked with at The Intercept, who has been published in many places now. He has one of the best Substack pages in the country where he does his investigative journalism and commentaries, Lee Fang.  

G. Greenwald: Lee, it’s always great to see you. 

Lee Fang: Hey Glenn, great to see you. Thanks for having me. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, so I want to start with the murder of these two Israeli embassy officials in Washington. We did a whole show on it last night, but the fallout sort of continues. 

I don't think we need to go into the question of whether there was any moral justness to these murders. I don't think any moral framework that I at least I recognize as valid suggests that anything other than unjust and horrific but there are a lot of attempts to exploit these murders beyond just expressing grief for the victims or condemnation for the shooter, including, essentially, immediately attempting to suggest that anyone who criticizes Israel or its war in Gaza in some sort of harsh way, or over some imaginary arbitrary line, is responsible for the killing as much as the shooter is, if not more so, and therefore we need to do something about that because that's spawning antisemitism and endangerment for Jews. What's your reaction to all that? 

Lee Fang: Look, I'm concerned about the kind of creeping martyrdom politics that have been coming into our system really for the last few decades. We see it more and more escalating on both the far left and the far right, whether it's far left activists seizing upon every kind of video of a police killing to make broad assumptions about the American criminal justice system and to engage in riots and calls for abolishing police, whether the far right who grab hold of any kind of immigrant crime or immigrant murder to say that we need to deport all immigrants or engage in some kind of draconian crackdown on immigrants. 

Now, we see this kind of increasingly in our Israel-Palestine debate where partisans are seizing upon this heinous crime that happened just a few days ago and really weaponizing it to engage in some type of collective punishment for their political opposition to claim all people who support peace in Palestine, justice or equal rights in that region, are somehow guilty of violence, that this act of political violence reflects on every American who supports peace or a cease-fire in Gaza. I mean, it's a little bit absurd, but it's kind of a continuation of this cycle of saying we want collective punishment on our political enemies, we want to weaponize any kind of tragic death into a partisan football, or just or partisan cudgel, to beat our political opponents. 

G. Greenwald: I actually started noticing it for the first time, I think, back in like 2005, 2006, right when I created my blog, started writing about politics. At the time, there was this blogger who was very pro-War on Terror, like very much of the view that we are at war with Islam after 9/11. Ironically, he became a sort of liberal resistance. His name was Charles Johnson. He wrote a blog called The Little Green Footballs. And one of the things he would do every day when he was in like his War on Terror fanatical stage was he had a daily occurring segment or a weekly occurring segment and he would title it “Religion of Peace” and he just published some sort of random robbery or burglary or assault or rape or violent crime that some Muslim somewhere in the world engaged in and thought that because he was constantly doing it, it was somehow making this point about Muslims in general being a menace. 

Obviously, you can do that to any race. You could do that to black people, you could do that to white people, you could do that to Christians, you could do that with Muslims, you can do that to Jews. When I recently was condemning or objecting to Matt Walsh, who went on Tucker Carlson to say it's better to leave kids in foster care and orphanages than to allow them to be adopted by same sex couples, I remember all these people replying to me, would show me stories about gay men molesting children and for everyone that they could show me, I could show them 20+ uncles molesting nieces at the age of five or some father molesting his daughter. It's such a stupid obviously, fallacious way to try to demonize a certain group of people and, obviously, the minute something like last night happens, we're supposed to believe that anyone now who condemns the war in Gaza is somehow a homicidal maniac or wants to kill Jews or wants to be antisemitic even though you can find literally every day Israel supporters in the United States saying the most nauseating things about Gazans. 

I mean, you can find Israeli officials in the last week saying Gazan babies are enemies because they grow up to be terrorists; “There's no such thing as innocent Gazans,” one official said we should segregate all the women and babies and children in Gaza and put them on one side and then put all the men 13 and above, so “13-year-old men,” they were calling them, and put then on another side and just execute all the men. It's such sophistry to try to argue this way, and yet it's done so often. 

Lee Fang: All connects back to my previous point that these are emotional arguments. They're not logical, they're not rational, they're certainly not empirical. It's very emotionally arresting when you see one of these police shooting videos. Often, they're without context, but even if the cop was in the wrong and was doing something unjust, that doesn't reflect on the millions of police-civilian interactions and all the thousands of different police jurisdictions that have completely different rules in training people will make sweeping assumptions about American policing after one of these very emotional videos. The same for an immigrant killing an American. You can see why someone could say that's unjust. This person was not supposed to be there, they're guests in our home and they're out killing or raping individuals, therefore, all immigrants are criminals or dangerous. It's that type of argument, and it's just being driven into overdrive with social media, with the kind of incentives around war. 

You have very well-financed pro-Israel advocacy groups. It's not just AIPAC, the super PAC and lobbying group, but dozens of other pro-Israel advocacy groups spending tens of millions of dollars per year pushing the U.S. foreign policy in one direction. So, for them to have this very tragic event that they can weaponize and use against their political opponents, they continue this push so that the U.S. stands in lockstep support of the Israeli government. Of course, that's what they'll do, but this is kind of an escalation we've seen in society over many years. It's just this dynamic that is very tribal, that is crude. It kind of appeals to the most basic instinct among us, and it really should be rejected. 

There are some principled Israel supporters and conservatives who have spoken out against this attempt to weaponize these tragic events, but it's really disappointing seeing people from across the board taking this and just saying, “We should have more censorship. We should support crackdowns on students. We should restrict speech. We should really support ethnic cleansing in Gaza because of it.” It is absurd. 

G. Greenwald: What makes it so much worse is, let's say, over the past decade, but especially as this kind of left-wing cultural war reached its apex with the word zenith, depending on your perspective with things like Me Too and then the Black Lives Matter riots of the fall of 2019, or 2020. Just then, the kind of wave that produced, of all sorts of language controls, taking premises to these completely preposterous conclusions. Most conservatives, in fact, almost by definition, were vehemently opposed to these sorts of victimhood narratives, these group-based grievances, these attempts to curb speech in the name that it made people uncomfortable or incited violence against them. And most of them, not all, but most of them, have now done an exact 180. 

All day yesterday, you heard people saying things like “There's systemic racism against Jews,” “Your speeches inciting antisemitism and bigotry.” Who knew that Donald Trump would be elected, and, within the first four months, his main cause and the main cause of his movement would be to declare a racism epidemic all around the world and the need to control speech to prevent it and protect these minority groups? 

It sounds very familiar, but just from a different direction. One of the people who was most vehemently opposed to this sort of left-wing oppression is Steven Pinker who was a very well-known biologist at Harvard and also a very vocal supporter of Israel but a very vocal critic of this sort of left-wing repression that has appeared on campuses and elsewhere. He has an article in The New York Times today that I thought was super interesting because it's also in the context of this attack by the Trump administration on Harvard and he said: “[…] For what it’s worth, I have experienced no antisemitism in my two decades at Harvard, and nor have other prominent Jewish faculty members. […] (The New York Times, May 23, 2025.)

So, we're talking here about this epidemic. I was reading some people yesterday, who were Jewish people in media, Jake Sherman was one, there were others, saying, “It's incredibly terrifying to be a Jew in America.” Not only did I live in the United States for, I think, 37 years, as an American Jew, and I'm there all the time. I've never once experienced an antisemitic assault or comments or anything like that, nor has anyone I know, and yet you're hearing this kind of wildly exaggerated set of claims about how Jews are endangered. 

So, he says: “My own discomfort instead is captured in a Crimson essay by the Harvard senior Jacob Miller, who called the claim that one in four Jewish students feels “physically unsafe” on campus “an absurd statistic I struggle to take seriously as someone who publicly and proudly wears a kippah around campus each day.” […] (The New York Times May 23, 2025.)

So that's not just a Jewish person, that's someone who wears a Kippah around campus every day and he's saying it's preposterous that people are saying there's some epidemic of antisemitism at Harvard. 

I mean, what he's basically saying there is that everything I thought I was supporting, fighting against when it was coming from the left, these group-based narratives, this attempt to restrict speech, this is a wild exaggeration of the danger of certain minority groups in the United States is now being flooding our discourse, from Israel supporters, he's making the point that it just sounds extremely familiar to him, but from the other direction. 

Lee Fang: Yeah, I mean, everything he's describing is pretty much accurate. The tools of wokeness that these kinds of studies claim astronomical levels of bigotry in society, you look back at 2020, a lot of Asian American groups claimed that anti-Asian hate crimes were skyrocketing. 

G. Greenwald: What was the name of that group? Stop Asian Hate? 

Lee Fang: Stop Asian Hate, yes, which was a spin out of Chinese for Affirmative Action. But this group, if you look carefully in their kind of footnotes of how they were quantifying anti-Asian hate, they were taking tweets that were critical of the lab leak theory or floating the lab leak theory that the COVID-19 virus might have come from Wuhan, China, and other kind of China critical tweets as examples of anti-Asian American hate crimes. So, they were grouping actual forms of violence, where, a lot of times, you don't know the intent. Perhaps someone of one race attacked someone else of another race. Is that a hate crime? It's context-dependent, but they were taking a broad brush on those. Then, they were juicing the numbers by taking tweets of something that they claimed was hateful, but turned out to be just a true fact, or likely a true fact, that the virus escaped from a bioweapons lab in China. 

Now, for the antisemitism kind of crisis or hysteria that we're in today, you look at the ADL and other pro-Israel advocacy groups at these studies that show a 300%, 500%, 1,000% increase in antisemitism. You look at the footnotes, and it's the exact same dynamic. It's folks who are critical of Israel in a completely neutral way, saying they just disagree with Israel's policies. That's deemed now antisemitic: groups like Jewish Voices for Peace, a Jewish-led leftist group that is critical of Israel's policies, holding rallies around the country. Each of these rallies in the ADL's report is tagged as an antisemitism hate event. So, that's how they're quantifying this gigantic, skyrocketing antisemitism problem. 

This would be laughably absurd if it weren't being weaponized and used by our government to crack down on speech and to defund science and medical research at universities around the country, but that's exactly what's happening. The Trump administration is citing these statistics and similar statistics when they're going after Harvard University and other universities, when they are cutting federal funding and when attempting to impose speech codes like the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which redefines antisemitism to include some criticism of Israel, and it's part of this kind of an investigation of Harvard around civil rights violations.

I mean if you zoomed out and just looked at the evidence, any normal person would laugh it off; any kind of ordinary person looking at what's been assembled as supposed examples of antisemitism are, you know, either incredibly minor or absolutely manufactured. And yet, this is the crisis that we're living in today. I wouldn't defend Harvard University on almost any other grounds. This is a school that acts like a hedge fund, that's accumulated huge amounts, that has deplatformed speakers in the past, that is kind of a platform for privilege, for billionaire donors to at times donate and get their kids into the school, and has engaged in some racial discrimination in the past, although the recent Supreme Court rulings on affirmative action have kind of rolled that back. Yet this current Trump administration attack, demanding that the school create safe spaces for Jewish students, create speech codes, preventing students from criticizing or even discussing Israeli policies, even getting rid of some of their departments that study the Middle East or study Israel's history or Palestinian history, I mean, it just kind of shocks  that they're doing this with absolutely no evidence. 

G. Greenwald: I mean, the idea that Harvard is some place that's hostile to Jews is almost as funny as that time the ADL issued a statement saying it's time for Hollywood to include Jews in their pro-diversity policies because Jews have been excluded for long enough from Hollywood and you just can't believe it's even being said. 

By the way, the thing that you mentioned about COVID drove me very crazy at the time and to this very day when I think about it, it still drives me crazy, which was It was really the Lancet letter, the proximal causes, notorious Lancet Letter that decreed well before they had any idea if it was remotely true what they were saying, that we know for certain that COVID came from the zoonotic leap, from animal to human, and that any attempt to suggest that it came from a lab leak in Wuhan was essentially racist and like an attack on our Chinese colleagues or whatever. Then, it immediately became canon that anyone who even raised the possibility that it might've come from a lab leak was being racist against Chinese people. 

The New York Times COVID reporter who became the COVID reporter when the real COVID reporter got fired because he said some things that upset a bunch of very wealthy teenagers whose parents paid for them to go on a field trip to Peru or something with him and they were offended by what he said, and so he got fired. So, they put this woman in, and she said one day we're going to grapple with the fact that this lab leak theory is racist, but I guess today is not the day. 

One always drove me so crazy about this. Besides the fact that who cares what theory was racist about where COVID came from? Like, all that mattered was what the truth was? Who cares which theory was more racist? It was like, where did it actually come from? But the idea that it was somehow more racist to say that COVID came from a highly sophisticated research lab in Wuhan, funded and partnered with the United States than saying, “Oh, Chinese people have these disgusting, filthy, primitive eating habits where they consume these filthy bats in wet markets and therefore got the coronavirus because they were the ones who were just eating things they shouldn't,” like the far more racist theory was the one they were insisting on, to this day insist on. It just always drove me crazy. Of course, the overwhelming evidence now is that it did come from that lab leak funded by the United States. 

All right, let me ask you about this article you wrote in your Substack

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So, I think it's a little bit self-explanatory, but you go into some really disturbing and interesting detail about what these funds that were set up for Jeffrey Epstein's victims and how much opportunity there was for Virgin Islands officials to profit from their protection that they gave him. What is it that you've been finding? 

Lee Fang: Yeah, so the Jeffrey Epstein saga is still not solved. There are still many unanswered questions. In February, the Trump administration promised to release unredacted files. The FBI, when they raided Jeffrey Epstein’s homes in 2018, collected CD-ROMs, other recordings, binders, all these files that remain unreleased to this day. They're sitting in a warehouse, the FBI warehouse in Winchester, Virginia and still, nothing has really been released. 

The documents that were supposedly released by the Trump administration were all previously released disclosures. There's nothing new there. My story takes a look at the other side of this, where the national media has really not paid attention. Many of the most important disclosures about Jeffrey Epstein's political network, how he's paid off politicians, particularly politicians in the U.S. Virgin Islands, but also some politicians in the territorial U.S., were released very suddenly and briefly during a lawsuit in 2023 between J.P. Morgan and the Virgin Islands. 

This sudden disclosure was kind of accidental because the U.S. Virgin Islands was hoping to win some settlement money from these crimes, a form of accountability after his death. They really did not expect it, but J.P. Morgan hit back hard, and it countersued and alleged that the Islands' officials were far more complicit in Jeffrey Epstein's criminal operations. From those disclosures, we got hundreds of emails, depositions, and other documents showing how Jeffrey Epstein kind of methodically paid off local politicians, customs agents, various governors and law enforcement agents to receive exemptions from the sex offender list in the Virgin Islands to travel back and forth. As he was bringing young girls, aged between 12 and 15, to his island, customs agents saw that and looked the other way, they refused to check on their safety. There's really just a litany of red flags he was raising, and yet he was paying off politicians to allow him to run his criminal enterprise. 

This piece kind of looks at how the governor, Albert Bryan, closed that window of disclosure. He quickly settled the lawsuit, he fired the attorney general, leading the JP Morgan lawsuit, he later replaced the attorney with one of Epstein's own lawyers, who serves to this day in the U.S. Virgin Islands. He promised that this legal settlement money would be used to prevent another Epstein criminal enterprise by using it to counter human trafficking, sex abuse, and that type of thing. Instead, it's being used as a piggy bank. Legislators there don't know exactly how the money's being spent but for what we do know, it is going to backdate government wages, it's going to vendor payments, it's going to a series of earmarks refurbishing various buildings in the Virgin Islands. There's very little transparency on how this money is being used and it's an ultimate irony or perhaps an injustice that the governor, who now controls these funds, is almost a quarter billion dollars of money, was part and parcel to the Epstein enterprise. He was receiving regular donations and gifts from Epstein. He was the one responsible for giving Epstein special tax breaks and then later pushing for his exemption from the sex offender list. 

So, while we have this kind of national conversation about the Epstein saga, and it's mostly focused on these documents in Virginia that are held by the FBI, which deserve to be disclosed, there are still so many unanswered questions and a lack of accountability in the Virgin Islands. 

G. Greenwald: It's interesting, for the last four years during the Biden administration, the Epstein files, as they've been called, were a major topic on right-wing media, especially independent right-wing media. Two people in particular, who are very influential and popular in that realm, went around constantly talking about whether Jeffrey Epstein killed himself, the doubts about why we should think that, as well as just bashing the FBI every day for concealing the Epstein files. 

Those two people were Dan Bongino and Kash Patel, who are now the Assistant Director and the Director of the FBI. And they, I'm sure you saw them on Fox News earlier this week, and one of the questions they got was about the Epstein documents. The interviewer said, “Did Jeffrey Epstein kill himself? And they both said, “Yes, Jeffrey Epstein absolutely killed himself. We saw the documents.” They were very uncomfortable, but they're saying we saw the documents that prove he killed himself. 

Well, all of you, including Donald Trump, ran on the platform of making the Epstein files public. Why haven't we seen these documents that convinced them of that? But more so, I think the biggest, most interesting question in the Epstein case is, and always has been, “Was Jeffrey Epstein working with or for foreign intelligence agencies?” And it's a binary question. Maybe there's more complexity to it. 

But why is it, do you think, that after four, almost five months, in office, not just the Trump administration, but the very people who kind of built their reputation, in part, on banging the table about the Epstein files, about crushing and bashing Christopher Wray and the FBI for not releasing them, are now in charge of the FBI, and these documents are still not released; not a single one, that wasn't previously public has been released. 

Lee Fang: Well, I was in your program last year to discuss our lengthy investigation about why every […] that influence operation in the U.S., that attempts to change our laws, change who gets elected to Congress, affect American policy – there is an effort to enforce the Foreign Agent Registration Act, so that they disclose their lobbying activities, except for Israel. There is very ample evidence that the Israeli government – and its evidence from Israel, from Israeli news outlets and from Israeli investigations – shows that show Israeli government is pouring millions and millions of dollars over the last 10 years into influence operations in the U.S. and there's been a conscious effort to avoid far registration. 

The Epstein saga kind of raises many two-tier justice questions: one is just generally broadly about the wealthy in society because they were working with Epstein, facilitating his crimes, potentially engaging in sex crimes with him. They are kind of protected from scrutiny. If this were any ordinary American, any lower-class American, they could expect severe penalties and a severe form of justice, but because these are the rich and powerful, they do not receive the same level of scrutiny. Then, for your question around the Israel issue, there is… 

G. Greenwald: To be clear, I didn't say Israel. I just wondered whether he was working for any foreign intelligence agency. 

Lee Fang: Well, many would say that there might be an Israel issue. Interestingly enough, within the J.P. Morgan litigation, the kind of discovery process in some of the exhibits that were filed in the Virgin Islands case, many of the emails between former Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Jeffrey Epstein and some of his associates were disclosed in that litigation in 2023. It was really just an incredible window into Epstein's network. Many other emails of VIP individuals who received help from Jeffrey Epstein, who gave him donations or asked him to “manage their money,” even though it wasn't clear what he was doing with the money, or were traveling to his island, or to his New York home, these were details that were ferreted out from the J.P. Morgan case. Perhaps, again, that's why they moved so quickly to settle it, to close that case. But yes, I think just generally, whether it's Israel or another country… 

G. Greenwald: Maybe it's like Sweden, or Nigeria, but we should know. 

Lee Fang: We don't know, it could be Finland. It's really any of those Nordic countries, but the fact that we don't have these answers and they're sitting on servers, not just with the FBI, right? 

In just this countersuit from J.P. Morgan, they were able to get a huge amount of discovery from Epstein's servers, from his estate, from his associates. He had a close network, Richard Kahn, [Darren] Indyke, […], these three or four individuals who helped arrange many of his financial affairs and helped with the facilitation of his operations in this one little litigation, we were able to see kind of peer into his world. If the government wanted to, if this was a priority for either the Biden administration or the Trump administration, they could make it happen because these emails we know exist. 

G. Greenwald: And I think it's worth noting, and this to me is one of the most persuasive pieces of evidence, that when Jeffrey Epstein was convicted in 2010 in South Florida when he was trafficking minors into his home in West Palm Beach to have sex with them and eventually got caught, the U.S. Attorney in Miami, Alex Acosta, who eventually ended up in the Justice Department, is the one who presided over this extremely shockingly generous plea bargain he got where, I mean, his charges were sex trafficking minors. Everybody who does that goes to prison for a long, long time. And he basically got something like 12 months, six months in prison, a suspended sentence and like community service or whatever. And then he was done and he went back right to… 

Lee Fang: Yeah, he got to spend most of it at home, right? He didn't even spend much of the time. 

G. Greenwald: Right, he started at home. Exactly. Alex Acosta, years later, when asked, “Why would you give a sex trafficker of minors such an incredibly light sentence?” He said, “I was told that he was Intelligence and to leave him alone.” 

So, there's every reason to believe that he had some connection to foreign intelligence. There were a lot of people with whom he was a close associate, including Jelaine Maxwell, whose father, Robert Maxwell, was most definitely a Mossad member; Les Wexner, who is the multi-billionaire who made Jeffrey Epstein rich, who has all kinds of ties to Israel. A lot of people try to say, “Oh, it was probably Qatar.” They always try to say like, “Oh, the country that's really influencing our politics and buying our politics is Qatar.” That was something Bari Weiss just published. I have a feeling that if Jeffrey Epstein were working for Qatari intelligence, that was something we would know and have known very quickly. 

The fact that you have two very hawkish people on the Epstein question, Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, who have been running around for years demanding full disclosure, outraged that it's not coming, and now they're suddenly the ones running the FBI and yet there's still not a single document, not one, release that hadn't already been seen – they did that ridiculous, humiliating debate where they called those right-wing influencers like Libs of TikTok and others to the White House and they gave them binders that said, “Epstein files set - phase one” and they were all waving around that binder and it turned out every single document in that binder had been already publicly disclosed long ago – it does really start to make you wonder, doesn’t it? 

Lee Fang: Yeah, this reporting, these details have not been easy. Some of this is a source from just the Virgin Islands for my story, a source from the Virgin Islands’ legislature. I talked to lawmakers there, I looked at litigation files, some which had never been published, even though there were litigation files from 2023, but also, the Virgin Islands operate in kind of a weird space, to U.S. territory, but they do not have an online system for just routine campaign finance disclosures. I had to pay a University of Virgin Islands journalism student to go in person and request documents and then pay an exorbitant fee, just to make photocopies and then have those sent to me.

Reporting this out over the last few months on a story that really should have been public way earlier was not easy to do, but it's clear that for Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, they don't have to do all these kinds of extra steps that I engaged in. This is not a question of ability, this is the question of will. Do they have the political will? Do they have the kind of wherewithal to weather the criticism, the kind of pressure from elite groups, potentially foreign intelligence agencies, by disclosing this information that could be very harmful to the political and kind of intelligence elite? 

G. Greenwald: And the fact that you do that reporting that is often expensive is another good reason for people to join your Substack, aside from the quality of the reporting that they get if they do. 

All right, let me ask you this last question. You're somebody who began journalism, associated primarily with the left. You worked at left-wing think tanks, not necessarily hardcore leftist think tanks, but you wrote for The Nation. You worked for the Center for American Progress, and you had a pretty left-wing outlook on things. You began to kind of have a breach with the around issues like crime and race, things that you were previously talking about, but crime was a really big one that, the left was constantly opposed to, almost reflexively, to any efforts to take crime seriously, to have the police emboldened or empowered to arrest criminals. You were particularly incensed by things like “defund the police,” that movement that arose in the wake of the George Floyd killing. And that has been something that you've taken seriously for a very long and in part because of your personal experience growing up in a mixed-race, working-class environment where there were a lot of working-class residents constantly victimized by violent crime. 

Now you live in California and San Francisco, where there's a lot of crime, obviously, including from immigrants who enter the country illegally. So as somebody who has taken those issues seriously, like the need to really crack down more on crime and violent criminals, as well as, you know, the flow of immigrants across the border, how do you look at thus far the Trump administration's efforts to crack down on people who have entered the country, especially those who have engaged in some sort of violence? 

Lee Fang: I see kind of like a lot of the same examples you've highlighted on the show as draconian as probably unconstitutional, illegal, immoral. If you look at what the Trump administration has done in terms of sending Venezuelans to CECOT, the maximum-security prison in El Salvador, I think it's morally horrendous. The Washington Post recently reported that many of the individuals that were sent there were people who were cleared for asylum status, who had protested Maduro, and then fled here after doing so.

Which senator was the one who encouraged people to rise up against the Maduro government in Venezuela and said that if you came to this country, we would provide new asylum protections and TPS protections to protect you? That was Marco Rubio. He led that.

So, just the absurdity, the kind of partisan cruelty for him to turn around and take those same individuals and send them to this prison without any due process is disgusting. Broadly speaking, I look at the kind of confirmation hearings this week for the USCIS role that the immigration wing of the Department of Homeland Security, that kind of manages a lot of the visa programs, and they're saying a lot of things that I think make sense, talking about the role of foreign workers, of these kind of temporary visa programs that were initially created 20 years ago, 30 years ago, like the one H1-B program and then the OPT program to encourage just the most skilled, scarce workers that we don't have in this country. These programs have ballooned into a kind of internal job replacement program where corporations are bringing millions of workers in who will work for lower wages for tech-related software and IT jobs. 

The Trump administration, which initially, back in January, rejected attempts to reform programs, is now kind of changing its tune and is considering a reform of these programs. This is something that Bernie Sanders and many of the more traditional class-focused left have talked about for a very long time. I don't see any problem with that. The other kind of enforcement areas of just like how do you get folks who are in this country illegally out of this country and then how do you prioritize to make sure that you're doing it in a way that's just and fair, it's a mixed record, right? 

At the end of the day, the Trump administration, on a month-to-month basis, has deported less than the Biden administration, compared to last year. There are some different variables here. There are fewer border crossings this year than last. You can also compare this year between this year and the last few years of the Obama administration, which had way more deportations. Again, there's a different variable there. There's more police ICE collaboration back in the Obama years than this year. There's simply not as much collaboration between police agencies and ICE in 2025, so it's perhaps not possible. So, it's hard to compare. If you look at some of the extreme measures they've taken against speech, ongoing after legal students who are here to study and who have protested Israel, and focusing on them to deport them. That's clearly absurd. The CECOT prison is absurd. I think for the rest of their kind of agenda, it's a mix. There's some good and bad. And I think just in terms of a policy, a lot of it just hasn't come into effect yet. The deportation numbers are actually quite low. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, they've relied on these kinds of very theatrical and flamboyant expressions of police state strength. “We're going to throw them into prisons in El Salvador, we're going to send them to Libya, we're going to put them in South Sudan,” things like that. But the reality is that there have been no mass deportations as promised by the Trump campaign. They've spent huge amounts of time and energy and money instead of going after them almost right away, as you said, people in this country who are completely law-abiding, who are here with green cards or student visas, for the crime of protesting Israel or criticizing Israel. And so in lieu of getting what they were told for 10 years from Donald Trump they would get, which is mass deportations, they're instead getting this massive crackdown on speech under the guise of immigration policy aimed at protecting this foreign country, Israel, from criticism and people have really not noticed, given all these kinds of sideshows over the Alien Enemies Act and shipping them to El Salvador and the fact that the integration deportation numbers are actually quite low. 

All right, Lee, thank you so much. It was great to see you, as always. I'm sure we'll have you back on our show soon. I hope you have a good evening 

Lee Fang: Thanks, Glenn. Have a good weekend. 

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All right, Friday night is for our interaction with our Locals members, but also in front of our entire Rumble audience. The reason we do that, as I've said before, is I think interaction with your audience is of the most importance. I have always hated the model of journalism that's monolog inform, where some journalists just step on a mountain top and bequeath to people the truth. I think it's very important to hear critiques and questions and interact. And we do that throughout the week on Locals. So, let's get into them. We have a lot of good ones tonight. I want to try to get to as many as possible. 

The first one is from @ChristianaK, who says:

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I talked a little bit with Lee about this and he said something I completely agree with, which is, I never thought I would be defending Harvard in my life. Especially over the last, say, 10 years, Harvard really has become a place which is almost ground zero for censoring speech. It's often ideologically homogenous. It's become just this kind of closed circle, a very specific, idiosyncratic, academic-ish left-wing culture war homogeneity. There's a lot wrong with academia in general. 

All that said, I find academia to be extremely important. I think it's a vital part of society. If you go back to the Enlightenment, which I regard as the founding principles of Western civilization, at least in the modern era, in terms of our political values and the like, academics talk frequently about the need to have at least one place in society where everything is up for grabs in terms of what you can debate, what you could challenge. There are no taboos, there are no pieties. I think having an institution in society like that, where everything is studied, everything is questioned and everything is poked at, is vital. It helped me learn a lot. 

It really stimulated my interest intellectually that there were all sorts of things out there that had been about questioning these long-term pieties and you were free to express the things that you wanted to express. I think it is quite disappointing, quite harmful, quite tragic that in so many ways our universities have become these ideologically homogenized outposts of political activism at the expense of what should be this academic freedom.

 Nonetheless, it really is true that one of the things that has been most responsible for America's success, economically, technologically, politically, socially and militarily, has been research that takes place at our highest institutions. Everywhere in the world, people look at Harvard and talk about Harvard with great admiration and awe. Here in Brazil, if somebody went to study at Harvard, even for a year, and they come back and they say, “Oh, I studied at Harvard,” it imparts them with immense credibility, and that's how it's looked at around the world. I mean, Harvard is one of the symbols of American greatness. It's been a leading college for 450 years, same as Yale, Brown and Princeton, but Harvard, especially globally, is at the top. 

So, I think, if you're going to have a government that suddenly decides that it's going to wage a major war to try to destroy what have always been America's leading academic institutions, it’s kind of out of the blue, just start attacking it in every conceivable way, I think everybody should be very guarded about why that's happening. 

In general, leading academic institutions and the government have had extremely close partnerships. The reason the federal government gives money to places like Harvard and Yale, and all sorts of other schools, is not because the government is being benevolent. It's not because the government wants it to have a nice gender studies program. Sometimes it's to fortify financial aid so that not only rich people from rich families can go to the top schools, but mostly it's for paying for research projects that the United States government once undertook. It was federal-funded research programs at our universities that led to the invention of the internet in the United States and American dominance over the internet for all those years. It came right out of the federal funding of academic institutions, cures and medical treatments, scientific advances and technological advances that often were things the government wanted done for military use. 

When you have well-funded research programs, that's how you attract the greatest minds from all around the world and that only fortifies the institution. Without these research facilities, it basically just becomes like a liberal arts school for 18-year-olds and 19-year-olds, as opposed to institutions where the highest-level research and innovations take place. On top of that, it's the question of why these institutions are being attacked. 

In the case of Harvard, Columbia, Yale, Brown, Princeton and all the others that the Trump administration has targeted, there has been one argument that I think is a valid one, which is that there has been discrimination in the admissions process for a long time. It was considered affirmative action, where you would purposely go out of your way to divide all the applicants into groups of race, to ensure that there was a representative percentage from each group. Part of that was to correct historical injustices, other parts of it were to have a more diverse campus. I think there was a time when you could make that argument that was necessary and over time we've gotten to the point where we've decided that that's no longer necessary that it's actually a form of racism in its own way and courts have stepped in and begun to rule against those sorts of practices and they had to scale back greatly on them. 

So, I understand that objection, but the much bigger reason, as we know, is that these schools allowed protests against Israel to take place. For many years – you can go back to 2010, 2012, 2014 – all of these groups that are funded by Israel or Israeli loyal billionaires were obsessed with American college campuses because they knew that that's where the primary activism against Israel was based on this boycott, divestment and sanctions model that helped bring down the apartheid regime in South Africa. Israel and its loyalists were petrified that that would work in American campuses. They knew a lot of the anti-Israel sentiment was being talked about and allowed on American campuses and they set out this whole anti-woke thing if you go and look at it, all these people who were obsessed with Israel, who led this anti-woke movement on college campuses, were doing it, in part, because they hated American colleges because it allowed too much Israel criticism. The Trump administration is saying that you have allowed too much antisemitism, meaning Israel criticism on your campus; they're actually forcing institutions to put their Middle East Studies program under receivership so the government can control what is taught in Middle East Studies programs. 

Who thought that the role of the U.S. government was to control the curricula of how adult academics who teach adult students can do their curriculum, can pick their course materials? But that's what the Trump administration is doing. And it's all because of Israel, to some extent, it's because they perceive it's kind of a left-wing institution, they want to attack it. But they've already denied funding these schools. 

Here from AP News on April 15: “Trump administration freezes $2.2 billion in grants to Harvard over campus activism (AP News. April 15, 2025.)

We know what that “campus activism” means: the Israel protests that you allowed. Harvard said, “Look, you've gone too far. We made a lot of concessions, but we're about to become a branch of the Trump administration if we go too far, we're going to sue instead.” And they sued, that's when the government went ballistic. 

Today, Homeland Security announced that they were canceling the student visas of all Harvard students, revoking them immediately, and would refuse to give student visas for any international students that want to go to Harvard in the future. So only 25% of Harvard has international students. It's a way that the United States spreads pro-American sentiment. People want to come to the United States, they want to study in the United States, they get integrated into American culture. It has great benefits for the U.S. As I said, people look at Harvard as this place that everyone around the world wants to go to, or Yale, or Princeton, or Columbia, Stanford, whatever. 

The idea that Harvard, of all places – its current president is Jewish, most of its past presidents, close to a majority, if not an overall majority over the last 30 years, have been Jewish. Larry Summers is one of the people who ran Harvard for the longest. Their biggest donors are overwhelmingly Jewish. Jews do very, very well at Harvard. The idea that it's some kind of cesspool of antisemitism is laughable. 

But as we know, any criticism of Israel is now deemed antisemitic and that's what's driving the Trump administration. So, now, you take these huge numbers of foreign students who have spent years pursuing PhD programs, a lot of them are going to graduate and stay in the United States and become extremely productive members American society, and even if they don't, even if go back to their countries, they're obviously going to have a connection to the United States, and now you take all these people who have put years and years into their studies, and out of nowhere, they're instantly told “Your visa is revoked and you can try to get into another school, we'll extend your visa then, but if you don't, Harvard doesn't have any more student visas. We're revoking them all, and we're banning Harvard from accepting any foreign students in the future”. 

This is basically on the verge of destroying Harvard, notwithstanding their $50 billion endowment. As Lee said, this $50 billion endowment almost makes them like a hedge fund. So, I don't have sympathy for Harvard, but it is true that denying them all federal money, destroying and forcing them to dismantle all research programs, and then disallowing any international students will absolutely cripple this institution that has for 500 years been the pinnacle of American greatness, a symbol of it, and a crucial tool in soft power. 

It's just yet another way that this government got into power and decided that one of its goals, if not its number one goal, was to punish anybody who was criticizing Israel. I think it's incredibly dangerous. What we've done is we basically turned the United States into a country where a requirement to enter, to study, or to work is that you love Israel and worship Israel, or that you at least agree that you were framed from ever criticizing it. We're just sacrificing so much of our national interest for this foreign country. 

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Question #2. It’s from @Kurt_Malone, who asked the following:

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This has been a controversy taking place among various journalists. I've certainly talked a lot before about how many of the people who have very lucratively branded themselves as free speech champions over the last several years, but who are really just Israel loyalists, who are doing this to attack college campuses and now have turned around.

Now you’re looking at this massive First Amendment attack in the name of stopping Israel criticism and they either barely care, barely mention it, occasionally mutter some mild opposition to say they have done it, they did or oftentimes, even support it.

Bari Weiss, yesterday, in response to the murder of the two Israeli embassy staffers, basically said anyone who's been attacking Israel or denouncing it in harsh ways, or its supporters, has blood on their hands. So, there are a lot of people who have built a large audience, mostly conservatives, right-wing people, or MAGA people, by championing free speech because over the past 10 years, conservative speech has been one of the main targets of censorship. And so, these people who are independent media outlets, who rely on subscription money from their viewers, it's a big problem in independent media. I've talked about it before. It's a problem in corporate media as well, that a lot of people don't want to say things that will ever alienate or offend their audience because they know if they do, there's a good chance that they'll lose subscribers, which is how they make their money. 

I've talked about it before, as an independent journalist, I also have that dynamic. After October 7, we lost a lot of subscribers who were pro-Israel and didn't want to hear my critiques of Israel and who still don't. We still lose subscribers over that. But over time, if you actually build yourself and your audience with a look to the long term as somebody who has integrity and you build an audience of people who know that you can't come and expect that you're going to always hear what you want to hear but you're always going to, at least, hear the honest perspective and an argument behind it, then you build an idea of people who respect your integrity and aren't here for validation,  which I would suggest is a much more valuable audience to have. 

So there have been some disputes. One of the people who has been most criticized for this is a friend of mine. So, I'm reluctant to speak specifically about him. You can go see these arguments. I will say, one of the reasons why I think it's so important to me that I have a great distance from the kind of social scene in Washington and New York and politics and media is because it is corrupting, it is difficult. If you end up immersed in a social circle and you end being friends with all these politicians who you're supposed to be adversarial to, or other journalists whom you're supposed to criticize because there is a sort of ethical, I think, valid principle, that if somebody is really your friend, I don't mean acquaintance, I don't mean somebody who you say hi to occasionally, but somebody who's really a friend is doing something you disagree with, to turn around and denounce them publicly. It's a real conflict in principles between, on the one hand, you want to hold people accountable and critique them when they deserve it, but on the other hand, like turning around and just publicly denouncing a friend is hard. 

So for the most part, that's why I avoid that social circle. I see it all the time. You see Jake Tapper in this book with all these journalists going around and talking about how they've known these Biden White House officials forever. And so, when they said there's nothing wrong with Biden, they didn't think they were being lied to; they believed them. They didn't want to criticize these people. That's what being friends can do to journalists or to, and I think it's a major reason why Washington is so corrupt, media and politics. They all live in the same neighborhoods and they all socialize with each other. They're all intermarried, the media and the political class. And so, they're anything but adversarial to each other, but I will say there's this idea that some of the people are saying, “Look, I don't want to comment on Israel and Palestine because I don't know enough about it, it's too complicated, it is just not an issue I want to talk about.” And then there's a resulting critique. No, the reason you don't want to talk about it is because you don’t want to defend Israel or the censorship being implemented in the United States in its name. After all, you would be obviously betraying everything you ever said you believed in. But you also don't want to denounce it because you have a lot of people who support Donald Trump or Israel in your audience and you're afraid of alienating them and losing money from saying what it is that you believe. 

So, let me just say, quickly, a few things about this because it is a growing controversy. One is that I actually am somebody who has always tried to, who strongly believes in the idea that there's nobody who can be an expert in everything. There's no person who has expert-level or specialized knowledge in every debate. 

It's always been so important to me never to report on, comment on, or analyze topics that I don't actually understand better than just the ordinary person who's not paying much attention. I've always only covered a handful of issues at one time that I believe I have some kind of specialized knowledge or expertise in, or some unique perspective that's informed, so that I can basically place a claim on the audience's time if I want to write about something or talk about something. I do agree that if there's something you don't understand well, if there is something that you haven't covered, it's best just not to talk about it. 

That said, once there's an issue that becomes so significant, maybe tariffs is an example, which is something that Trump's tariff policy was something I ordinarily would not talk about since I'm the last person who can give you a good microeconomic assessment of tariffs and the like. But I can talk about other aspects related to it. I can have people on my show that I've talked to, that I asked about, because some issues are just too big to ignore. And the war in Israel, especially if you're an American citizen whose government is paying for that war and arming that war, given that world organizations have called this a genocide, people have said this is the worst war in their lifetime that they've ever seen, even an Israeli former Prime Minister came out and said today that Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza, two million people being starved to death. Our government is paying for it, at the same time, there are major implications in the United States, on Americans and our basic constitutional rights. It's just not an issue that I think you can just say, “Yeah, I don't understand that. I think I'm going to avoid that.” I'm not saying you have to cover it every day, I'm saying you have super didactic opinions about it, but I think it's kind of an abdication of your responsibility if you have influence on a platform to just refuse to talk about the most significant issues that the entire world is discussing, especially when they directly affect the causes that you have claimed you're most invested in. 

Again, I think there are a lot of people in the sort of what had been called the international dark web, as they self-glorifyingly named themselves, who pretended to be free speech advocates, who have now abandoned that because the real loyalty was to Israel. And then some people just haven't really spoken much about it because audience capture is very real in independent media. It's not like you're either super noble and you don't care about it, or you're just integrity-free, greedy money, sucking pig. There are a lot of nuances, and there's a big spectrum between those two things. But I do think it's very important if you're going to have any credibility that you do everything possible to ensure that you never have a fear of your own audience and that you have this view that it's better to lose some audience and subscribers short-term or maybe even long-term that you won't replace, especially if you're somebody who's built a big platform and making a very good living doing this, than it is to just have the goal to build the biggest audience possible by avoiding ever telling them anything that might make them at all upset.

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 Question #3 is from @teardrinker who says:

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So, just for those of you who didn't see it, there's this big controversy in Brazil, actually a major epidemic in Brazil. Brazil, under this very unpopular president, in 2017, legalized gambling basically overnight. As a result, all these apps popped up to allow people to put their money into these accounts and then start betting on sporting events or all sorts of things online, playing casino games. Huge numbers of people, millions of people, Brazil's a country with a huge economic inequality, have become addicted to gambling, to these apps on their phones. The minute they get government assistance that is supposed to feed their family, or their paycheck, they transfer the whole thing into their gambling account. They've been told that it's a way to get rich, to escape poverty. And you have people massively in debt, losing everything, destroying their families over this gambling addiction. 

A major reason why is that you have these Instagram influencers who have tens of millions of followers who show people their super glamorous, luxurious lifestyle. These betting companies are paying these influencers to tell their young audience, their poor audience, “Oh, you should go bet. Use this betting app. You can make so much money.” And they show videos of the influencers betting and making money that are often fake. And not only do these influencers get millions of dollars to lead their poor and young audience into betting but they get percentages of whatever losses their audience has, which is profit for the betting app. And we showed you a part of an investigation that the Brazilian Senate is doing on this. 

And so, here's this question:

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Okay, it's so interesting because I have always taken a very libertarian approach to all of these issues. My general philosophy is that if you are an adult, you have the absolute right to consent to whatever behavior you want to engage in, as long as it's not directly harming somebody else. And by that, I mean like punching somebody or attacking somebody violently. I don't mean like blowing your money on some stupid, ill-advised shopping spree and then harming your family because now they can't pay their bills. I mean, direct harm. 

I believe that about pretty much everything. What drugs people take, what alcohol they consume, whether they gamble, whether what kind of sex they engage in with other adults consensually, my view of that has always been very strongly this libertarian view that adults should be able to make whatever choices they want that involve consent, and it's nobody's business to stop them. You can have public campaigns about the dangers of alcoholism or drug addiction. I'm all for that, so you give people information, but I don't believe in intervening, and I think they are responsible for the choices that they make. 

I have begun to rethink and retreat from that absolute libertarian view of people's choices a bit. I'll explain why. We're really entering a dystopian society, and we've had this for a long time, a dystopian world, where there are parts of the world that are extremely affluent and that most of the world is incomprehensibly poor. And you have things now, like for example, we talked about this before, we'll probably do some reporting on it because I want to learn more about it, but you have these affluent Europeans, I'm sure Americans as well, who need a kidney transplant and there's nobody who's compatible, who will give them a kidney. So they're traveling to countries in West Africa that people are barely at a subsistence level. And they're paying them $20,000, $30,000 and $40,000 to donate a kidney. I mean, is that something that we really should say is nobody's business? You have two adults in a transaction, one selling their organ to the other so that they can feed their children. Or is there something like incredibly exploitative about that to the point where it's very hard to say that that's actually consensual? 

I've been thinking the same thing about surrogacy arrangements. You have very wealthy couples. Most of them, by the way, are not gay couples; most of them are straight couples, contrary to belief, overwhelmingly straight couples, although the number of gay couples doing it as well has increased. And they want a baby. They can't produce a baby for whatever reason. Gay couples can't procreate. A lot of straight couples can’t either. Sometimes they don't want to, the woman doesn't want to carry a baby. 

So, they find a woman who needs $30,000, $50,000, whatever, $100,000 to carry their baby with an agreement that the minute that baby is born, the biological mother just hands over the baby, has no rights to it. Probably, if you asked me 10, 15 years ago, I would have said, “Yeah, that's their own choice. Who is the state, or anyone, to intervene in that transaction?” 

I find it hard to believe that the vast majority of women who do that are not very, very harmed psychologically. And again, as people get richer and the rich-poor gap increases, these kinds of transactions are going to become more and more complex. What about couples in the West who can't procreate and want to adopt but don't want to go through the adoption process? And so, they go to Africa, or they go to Asia, to extremely poor countries, and they pay some family. They say, “Hey, I see you have a healthy three-month-old infant, or a six-month infant, or a two-year-old, we want one of those. If we pay you $100,000, can we take your kid?” I mean, that's the same thing, right? That's very consensual, it's transactional, but is anyone going to say they have no qualms about that? 

I think sometimes Americans have problems understanding what poverty around the world is if you haven't lived in a country where it exists. What's considered poor in the United States, I mean, now it's become a little more severe, but what is considered poverty in the United States is nothing like what is considered poverty in most places in the world. There may be people who don't have access to clean water, don't have access to healthcare, don't have access to anything. And the internet is everywhere, and people are influenced. That's why they're called influencers. 

That's the same with gambling. So, I'm not saying that people who end up gambling and losing everything and destroying their lives and the lives of their family have no responsibility. Of course, they have some. Nobody forced them to do it. I've stopped thinking that all these things have this kind of pure, beautiful, consensual character to them because I have trouble seeing that as purely consensual. And again, I'm not saying it should be banned. I'm not even saying necessarily that I think it's the role of the state to stop it, but it doesn't make it so that it's perfectly fine either. Yeah, this is something I've been reconsidering. I think there's a lot of pressure for exploitation. 

As for this word “gaslighting,” I just, in general, hate new words that pop up and become part of the ethos. And especially gaslight was used mostly by a kind of MeToo movement. It was part of that MeToo lexicon where I think the excesses of Me Too have been well-documented. I oppose them from the beginning. I hate mob justice. I hate the idea that accusations should be treated as true with no evidence. I don't trust any human being, man, woman, anybody, with that level of power to say, “Oh, your accusations, they have to be inherently believed.” And that's where gaslighting came, a very, kind of vague accusation that people began making against their husbands or their boyfriends to claim that their relationship was, quote-unquote, “toxic.” I understand what it means. 

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Next question, @kkotwas asked:

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 It's funny, I was going to ask Lee a very similar question. I think that there has been a drastic, visible, palpable, documentable, severe turn in public opinion both in the United States and globally toward Israel. Israelis are talking about how they're becoming a “pariah state.” The level of dehumanization and cruelty and suffering and killing that Israel has perpetrated on the Palestinians for 17 months, as we've all watched it live every day and that they're saying they're going to continue to perpetrate basically until these people are in concentration camps, driven out of their land – and imagine the level of violence that's going to cause. They are announcing that they are entering Gaza. They're going to take to it all, they're going to bomb whatever's left, they're going to force Palestinians to leave, the ones who don't are going to be in concentration camps, a little walled-off, fenced-off areas that they get to stay in, surrounded by the IDF. These are concentration camps. 

It has turned the world against Israel in ways never previously seen since the creation of Israel in 1948. And they know that, polling data shows it. You see countries that have been among the most vocal Israeli supporters and allies for a variety of political reasons, like Canada, the U.K. and France, jointly issuing a statement, vehemently condemning Israel, not merely a mouth condemnation. Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant have been officially indicted by the International Criminal Court as war criminals. They have to avoid certain countries. IDF soldiers are afraid to go to various countries. There are projects to make sure they get arrested or chased out of the country, which happened in Brazil. We actually interviewed the head of one of the groups that tracks IDF soldiers who participated in crimes in Gaza, because all these countries are signatories to various conventions that forced them to arrest people on their soil who have committed war crimes. One almost got arrested in Brazil, he got snuck out at the last second. 

And then Israeli tourists as well are being met with all sorts of hostility and I think that's why there have been these desperate attempts to censor Israel criticism, to criminalize it, to attack these universities over it, to arrest and deport people for criticizing or protesting Israel; these are acts of desperation. 

And yeah, I don't think that the murder of two Israeli staffers, as terrible as it obviously is, and the scope of what's happening in Gaza that's been happening for the last 18 months, that will continue to happen unless it's stopped for the next year or so, or however long, I think it's going to be a speed bump. 

Israel supporters are hoping they can turn it into something much greater, but I don't think it's going to succeed, given how Israelis are still not just destroying all of Gaza and the people in Gaza, but saying some of the most Nazi-like horrific things, including Israeli officials that think we should separate the women and the children and then take all men 13 years over and exterminate them. They're all them saying Gazan babies are enemies, there are no innocent Gazan babies, they grew up to be terrorists. Really sick, sick stuff. They don't think the world is good. I want to say tolerate, but I don't think there's any stopping Israel in the sense that they're an apocalyptic cult, and it would take some political will on the part of the West and the United States, almost like a humanitarian intervention, to really stop it. 

But I think Israel is going to pay a huge price for a long, long time; they have all kinds of internal dissent. Netanyahu is consolidating all sorts of undemocratic power. They were in a civil war before October 7 over the Supreme Court, whether orthodox Israelis have to serve in the military, and they have a lot of internal tension. People are fleeing the country. So no, I do not think these two murders of last night are going to radically change the trajectory of how Israel is perceived. 

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All right, the @farside asks:

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I've been saying this from the beginning. Every time there’s a Supreme Court ruling against the invocation of the AEA, where they're required to give the new process. Now, a Trump-appointed judge and an appellate court have said Trump's not even allowed to invoke the AEA: it's only for wartime. And then you have a bunch of Trump supporters saying, “But what do you mean? We voted for mass deportation. Are we supposed to give trials to 20 million people?” 

I've always turned to emphasize, I think it's now finally being understood, not just for me, but others, that the problem is that you have a deportation system instead of laws. It's very easy. You just deport. You show they're not in the country illegally, you send them back to their home country. The problem is that Trump didn't want to use that. He wanted to invoke the Alien Enemies Act. Something that has only been invoked three times before, during wartime, the War of 1812, World War I and World War II, because it gives Trump immense power, far more power than he has otherwise. 

So, automatically, the president's powers increase in times of war, the deference that courts give a president when there's a wartime emergency automatically increases. So, by declaring war, Trump's already consolidated more power. And then, the Alien Enemies Act gives him almost unfettered power to do anything to people he declares to be an alien enemy. He can just put them in camps. 

Remember, he sent them to Guantanamo and that's the policy that FDR invoked to put Japanese Americans in camps. You don't have to send them back to their home country. That way, you can just send them to El Salvador, a country they've never been to and have nothing to do with, and put them into prison. And you can send them to Libya. You can send them to South Sudan, which the Trump administration is now talking about doing and in the process of doing. The Trump Administration came in wanting to ensure, and I think understandably in a way, because Trump’s first term was basically characterized by constant subversion of the president's authority. Trump was boxed in all the time, he was sabotaged, and they were determined to not allow that to happen by this big bureaucracy, by the deep state, by the administrative state. And so, they came in determined to have a plan to allow Trump to do whatever he wanted with no constraints. The Alien Enemies Act was part of that.

The problem is that it is a very severe law, only intended for wartime. And even then, as the Supreme Court said, 9-0, when it said they're all entitled to habeas hearings before being removed under the AEA, even people suspected of being Nazi sympathizers, Nazi operatives inside the United States were given a hearing before they were detained or deported. All these legal controversies around deportation are not about deportation itself; they're about the AEA, which Trump invoked, because of the extraordinary powers that it gives him. 

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All right, I think this is the last question. It's from @65wakai:

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Yeah, that's a very complex question to answer in a short period. It all depends on how long people have been there. I mean, there's obviously an indigenous population in the United States that American settlers and colonialists went to war with, massacred, and now they have rights recognized by the United States, including their own sovereignty inside reservations. There are indigenous people in Brazil who came way before Portuguese colonization. Primarily in the Amazon, there are tribes that are still undisturbed, unconnected to the world. It's a little hard to say that they don't have rights to Brazil, where they've been for who knows how long. Same with Africa. 

If you're talking about Israel and Palestine, I think the problem there is that it's not really a claim that, “Oh, my people have a right to this land.” It's really that “God gave my people this land,” it's not, “Oh, we've been here for a long time, therefore, we should have it,” it's that “God said this is ours.” 

I do not think that theological claims about what God wants and who God wants to be in certain places are a valid claim for that land. We have a geopolitical system of solving diplomatic conflicts, which the world recognizes, and the Israelis are lucky, because for a long time, it didn't look like this. Would Israel, with certain borders, the 1967 borders, with the West Bank and Gaza belonging to the Palestinians and most Israelis who now want to steal the West Bank in Gaza and act against all international law and take it for only Jews, are doing so because they believe that God has bestowed them that. And I think that's a much different question. It's one of the things that bothers me about Zionism as an ideology: it inherently depends upon a Jewish supremacy that, at least within Israel, Jews will always be supreme and I don't think that it's an ideology that leads to anything good.

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Israeli Embassy Staffers Killed in DC: Reactions and Implications; DHS Terminates Student Visas for Harvard
System Update #459

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

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There's a lot to talk about because a cold-blooded murder happened last night on the streets of Washington, D.C., as a gunman apparently targeted people associated with an event held at the Capital Jewish Museum, where the American Jewish Committee was hosting a reception for young diplomats. The two victims, a couple in their mid-20s, soon to be engaged, were both staffers at the Israeli embassy in Washington. The shooter left behind a manifesto stating he was doing it, killing people, to protest Israel's ongoing destruction of Gaza, and he yelled pro-Palestinian slogans, including “Free Palestine,” once he was arrested. 

It goes without saying, or at least it should, that randomly targeting people you don't know for murder is morally unjust in all cases, regardless of the justness of the cause in whose name you're doing it. But the reaction to this violence predictably lurched very quickly. We'll look at all the ramifications and the attempts to use these killings for various agendas. 

Then, the Department of Homeland Security announced today that it was immediately revoking all international student visas for Harvard, forcing all students to try to find another school or face deportation from the United States. All of this comes as the Irish rap band Kneecaps has been formally charged with terrorism crimes by the U.K. government – terrorism crimes – for featuring a sign at one of their shows in support of Gaza and against Israel, as well as using images of Hezbollah in their show. As global public opinion grows against Israel, threatening to make it, in the words of an Israeli official, a "pariah state", the censorship campaign and the efforts to suppress Israel's criticisms become more severe and more desperate every day. 

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What happened last night in Washington, D.C., by all appearances, and we should definitely wait for more investigations and for facts to unfold because often things aren't what they appear to be in the first day or week, but by all appearance it seems as though somebody very committed to the cause of protesting the Israeli destruction of Gaza, the Israeli ethnic cleansing in Gaza, and the Israeli genocide in Gaza decided that, even though the world is starting to realize what's going on, even though the U.S. government itself understands that the population is turning against it, that there's simply nothing that will be done to stop the slaughter of Palestinians by Israel – based on some very twisted moral reasoning, that he thought it was justified and helpful – to randomly gun down too young Americans with ties to Israel although he presumably didn't even know they had ties to Israel at the time that he did it. 

It was a couple that was going to be engaged when they went to Israel next week, She was Jewish, grew up in a Jewish family, had very strong ties to Isreal, had often gone there but when she would go there, she would work on with the groups that try to bridge gaps between Israelis and Palestinians to kind of create dialog between the two, to try to encourage peaceful coexistence. 

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